


Just to Sit Outside Your Door

by rainydayrambling



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Corporate, Explicit Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:27:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 57,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23983798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainydayrambling/pseuds/rainydayrambling
Summary: Damen is the leader of Akielos, a vigilante group set on bringing down mega-corporations that abuse the people of the city of Delpha.  Laurent is the heir to DeVere Corp., one such corporation.  When a personal assistant position is listed for Laurent, Akielos steps in to make sure Damen gets the job.  But being Laurent's live-in assistant presents challenges Damen never anticipated, and through a series of shared stories, secret missions, and midnight plotting sessions, his feelings for the acerbic heir quickly begin to change.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 94
Kudos: 173





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At the beginning of all of this quarantine madness, I knew I needed a comfort read. Over the course of those first few days, I re-read the Captive Prince trilogy, which has been one of my favorites for a few years now. It felt so good to get back to this world, to these characters who I love so deeply, but I was ravenous. It wasn't enough. I came to AO3 and dug through years' worth of fic and devoured that too. I scoured all the tags on all the sites and apps that I use. I read Prince's Gambit and Kings Rising *again.* In other words, returning to Captive Prince has been pretty much the hallmark of my isolation. The story, the characters, and this fandom have been here for me literally every single day of the last month-and-a-half I've spent in my house. They've kept me going, and I'm truly so grateful.
> 
> I've always shied away from writing for this fandom because the books are so deeply satisfying to me, and because there's already so much fic out there that I believe just far surpasses anything that I'm capable of doing. But it felt only natural to extend the comfort and love I feel for the series into my writing life, and it feels good to share it now.
> 
> I just wanted to start out by saying thank you to everyone who is reading and writing and creating artwork to help keep this fandom alive. I hope if you read this story I've spent the last several weeks working on, you enjoy it and that it brings you some comfort and fun in these difficult times, as it has for me. Either way, thank you for being here and sharing the Captive Prince legacy with me. I genuinely appreciate being part of this community, and I'm excited to be contributing to it for the first time.
> 
> Please enjoy! Title is from Hozier's "From Eden," because of course it is.

Damen took one look at Laurent DeVere and knew that applying to be his personal assistant was up there as one of the worst miscalculations he had ever made.

The fact that he generally found himself attracted to women more often than men meant nothing in the wake of Laurent's cool blond hair, his even cooler, bright eyes, like two icy lakes. The tightly-built, lithe form hidden treacherously beneath his well-fitted clothes: tapered, navy trousers, a pretty, lighter blue button-down, with every button done up, from throat to cuff, so that he looked severely held into it.

If only the man had been less careful with himself, less prone to skipping or outright refusing public appearances. If Nikandros had seen even one photo of this man, he would have insisted that they send someone else. He already hadn't liked the idea of Damen doing this. The Akielos were a powerful group, but -- Nikandros said -- they were only as strong as their leader. He thought Damen should have sent Kastor in his place, so that Damen could remain with the group and manage the operation from a safe distance.

But Damen had never been one for leading from the back of the action. He told Nikandros this was too important to leave to someone else, even his own half-brother. But if he'd known the reality of what he would be facing, he may well have sung a different tune.

Laurent stood some distance apart from him, toward the center of his open-layout loft, high over the city of Delpha, sprawling and chaotic below. Damen knew that if he were to go to one of the windows that made up most of the outer wall of the loft, the city would look distant and dream-like from this height.

Damen knew the city better on a level, or even from below. He spent much of his time in the dens, the dark holes, the back alleys of the city's underworld, the scarred and grimy underbelly of the shining, massive beast of which this loft seemed suddenly to be the head.

From where he waited several feet away, Laurent regarded Damen with a cool, neutral expression. Damen had arrived just a few minutes earlier, let in by an actual maid. At Laurent's sharp question -- "Who are you?" he’d said, only in his acerbic voice it sounded more like, "Who allowed this cockroach into my home?" -- Damen had stumbled through the explanation that he was the new member of his staff, the personal assistant he'd hired.

Of course, Laurent didn't know that the Akielos had made sure that every other applicant had been paid off (or scared off) so that he was the only remaining option. But he didn't need to know that.

Finally, Laurent said merely, "We'll have to find you some suitable clothes," without so much as a glance in his direction as he stalked off across the carpeted floor and into a room at the other end of the loft.

Damen looked down at himself. He thought he looked presentable -- even unnecessarily posh. His own pants were not dissimilar to Laurent's, though his were black. And Nikandros had put him into a simple white button-down shirt out of a desire to make him look as non-threatening and unoffensive as possible.

His size was a point against him, perhaps, as far as looking like someone who would be hired as a personal assistant. But Damen had figured that out: if Laurent ever commented on it, or asked, he would simply say that Laurent's staff had thought it might be good to have someone who could defend him if necessary. A personal assistant and bodyguard, for the price of one.

Now, though, it seemed that all of the confidence Damen had brought with him to the top of the seventy-second floor, he had left behind on the other side of the door when he stepped into Laurent's loft.

Already he began to doubt the accuracy, or at least the comprehensiveness, of the information he’d been given on what would be expected of him -- to manage Laurent's personal calendar, follow him wherever he went, make himself available at all hours to fetch things, solve problems, mend relations ("Mend relations?" he had asked in his interview, and the young man putting the questions to him had merely given him a nasty smirk before moving on).

Finding himself alone in the loft, Damen took the opportunity to draw in a deep breath and reassure himself that if he could handle an opponent twice his size in the ring, then he could certainly handle some spoiled, rich prince in a tower, no matter how attractive he was.

A little calmer now, he took the opportunity to look around the loft. He was to live here with Laurent. From what he understood, he wouldn't be the only one, though the other members of Laurent's personal staff were scattered throughout the building. Damen would be the only person sharing his personal apartments, and ostensibly this was because he had to be here for Laurent at any time of day or night, for whatever he might need. Ominous.

The loft itself seemed pleasant enough, if unnecessarily opulent. It was situated at the corner of the building, at the very top, so that two entire walls were made of glass windows. On the inside of the loft, there appeared to be several more rooms, but all of these, including the one Laurent had just disappeared into, had doors shut against them so Damen couldn't see inside.

Focusing instead on the open, main room, he saw that in one corner was a small kitchen. It didn't look like much -- just a fridge, a counter with a sink in it, a very small oven and stovetop, a microwave, and an island set with four tall chairs.

If Laurent had only himself to feed, Damen supposed the kitchen wasn't so small, even though to him it looked cramped and strange. Where Damen came from, a kitchen was almost more cafeteria, and it seldom ever emptied entirely. In any case, he reasoned, he doubted Laurent did much of his own cooking. When he wasn't out at fancy restaurants (already a voice whispered in the back of his mind that he must not go out much, in fact, or when Akielos had been doing their research, they would have been able to pull up photos of him) he probably had staff to cook for him and bring him his food.

The rest of the loft appeared similarly decked out. It didn't look especially lived in, and Damen wondered if Laurent had other homes in other cities where he spent more time. Not much was known about the DeVere heir, except that he could not inherit his father's company until he turned twenty-one. In the meantime, the president and CEO of DeVere Corp. remained Laurent's uncle, who had none of Laurent's passion for privacy.

Damen had known who "Mr. DeVere" was since childhood. Everyone did. Even before his brother, Laurent's father, had died of cancer years ago, Mr. DeVere had been the face of the company.

It was commonly believed that he enjoyed the attention where his brother did not, and so the late founder of DeVere Corp. had made ample use of his brother for public announcements, informational tours, press conferences, and most likely events and functions as well, although Damen, having grown up in the lower city, would not have known about that.

Continuing his own little tour around the loft, Damen examined the entertainment center in the middle of the room. It dominated the center of the loft, all sturdy white shelving. When Damen had first entered the room, he'd assumed the thing housed a massive television, but upon closer inspection, it held only books. On both sides of the central unit, the shelves were neatly packed with books. A few chairs of different sizes and different comfort levels were scattered around the unit, as though the reader preferred to have options, or moved from seat to seat as he read.

The sense of opulence in the place came mostly from the quality of everything -- finer than anything Damen had ever seen, certainly -- and from the artwork. On the walls that weren't windows, paintings hung everywhere. And statuary was scattered throughout the room, even in the kitchen. A nearly full-sized marble bust of a man sat on one of the bookshelves, most likely where anyone else would have kept a television.

In general, the color of the place was simple: cool tones that were not exactly welcoming, but which did give the space an air of comfort, at least to a certain type. Most of the color came from the paintings on the walls, which didn't seem to follow any particular pattern or trend that Damen could see. Some were large, abstract pieces full of bold reds and aqua blues, while others were dreamy, pastel landscapes. Somewhere at the back of his mind, Damen found himself wondering if he would ever learn why these particular pieces had been chosen.

Then he shook himself. He was not here to get to know Laurent, or his taste in art. Laurent DeVere was a target, a way for Akielos to get into his family's corporation, nothing more. At best, Laurent himself was a pawn of his uncle, clueless and too dim or unimaginative to realize the scope of evil DeVere Corp. represented. At worst, he was an agent of that evil himself. Either way, Damen had a job to do, and he had come here himself to make sure it was done properly.

"Well?" he heard from behind him, and Damen spun to find Laurent poking his head out of the door he had walked through a moment before.

Damen stared blankly at him for a moment, wondering if he had somehow missed something. But no, Laurent had said nothing. He was merely waiting for Damen to follow him, which evidently he had been meant to understand in the first place.

Laurent's face, which had so far been unreadable, now gave away his impatience, his full lips pinched. Damen hastened to follow after him, reminding himself that he was meant to be at this man's beck and call.

Getting used to taking and following orders was going to be harder than he thought.

#

Laurent's eyes narrowed as the brute finally caught on and came toward him across the apartment. He didn't know what to make of the great lug, except that he clearly was no personal assistant. Had his arrival here been his own choosing, his own manipulation, to get to Laurent's side? Or was this the handiwork of Laurent's uncle?

He didn't know, and not knowing left him unsettled. But he couldn't allow the stranger to see that. At the very least, not until he knew for sure what he was doing here.

Laurent brought the man -- Damen -- to the bedroom he would be using over the course of his employment. "However long that lasts," he said, because no matter whose motives had led to Damen's presence here, Laurent had no scruples making sure he knew that Laurent himself didn't want him here, and frankly found his presence distasteful.

He brought Damen quickly through the room, spare but for the bed, an empty closet, and its own private bathroom. Everything that had made it what it once was -- the room where Auguste would stay, when he came to visit Laurent in Delpha -- had been stripped from it.

With this done, Laurent led Damen back out into the hall and down to his own bedroom. He did not, however, open the door. "This room is mine," he said. "You will only come here if specifically summoned. Since I don't expect that to happen, you will not come here."

Something sparked in Damen's face, some trace of mischief or hint of amusement that caused the corners of his eyes to crease and his lip to quirk as he suppressed it, struggling to maintain a professional demeanor.

"If I'm not to come here, why show it to me?" he said.

Laurent watched him closely for another moment. Was this insolence, or merely ignorance? And again, he found himself unable to find the answer in Damen's face, despite the fact that it did nothing to hide its emotion. "So you'll know to avoid it," he said finally. "Now get out of my way. I have work to do."

Damen stood where he was, openly baffled. Laurent wasn't sure he'd ever seen anyone so free with their feelings. It was uncomfortable to watch. But Damen all but gaped at him, open-mouthed, as Laurent stood, discomfited, and waited for him to move. His considerable bulk was blocking most of the hallway.

"I need a book from the living room," Laurent said slowly, in an attempt to be as insulting as possible so that Damen would, at least, be startled into doing as Laurent wanted. It didn't work.

Instead, that look of insolence/amusement was back on his face, and he said, "Aren't I meant to be assisting you, Mr. DeVere?" His voice had changed too, gone low and maybe mocking.

Laurent felt his eyes narrow, his blood running like veins of ice beneath his suddenly-crawling flesh, and a deep, deep part of him wished very much to strike out at this man who had somehow wormed his way into Laurent's very home.

That, of course, he could not do. At the very least, not here. Not when his uncle had people crawling all over this building. He may have been relatively safe in his own apartment (or he had been, before today) but he didn't fool himself that he could overpower Damen in any sort of a fight, and if Damen had been placed here by his uncle, then he would just be handing the man valuable ammo.

So he restrained himself. He managed to bite out the words, "Do not call me that." And then, to save face, and to remove himself from this titan as quickly as possible, he wrote off the book from the living room and instead stepped into his own bedroom, slamming the door in Damen's face for good measure.

#

Damen did not know what to make of Laurent DeVere. It became immediately apparent that his physical beauty was like that of a venomous snake: meant to warn off, or to entice only for the kill.

Their first days in the loft together were endlessly painful, in one way or another. For one thing, it seemed Damen could do nothing right. Not in Laurent's eyes. He was, of course, hardly here for the purpose of being Laurent's personal assistant. But playing the role was an essential part of his true task. In order to achieve his purpose, he had to remain on with Laurent. But Laurent himself seemed to have no real need of him.

Damen had expected that he would be tasked with simple things: fetching Laurent's coffee, running errands, helping to manage and maintain his schedule. But Laurent rose almost stealthily in the earliest hours of the morning, and he never called for Damen's help. He made his own coffee -- if the empty mugs left in the sink were any indication -- and if he ate, he did it quickly, silently, and alone.

As for errands, he had other people to do that for him, as Damen soon learned. Nearly every day, some person would come by the loft with packages from the city, or news and information that they would relay to Laurent right there in the doorway before going off again.

His schedule, Laurent was more than capable of managing himself. Damen never saw him with any sort of day planner, but he came and went -- always leaving Damen behind -- with a precise knowledge of where he needed to be and when he needed to be there, it seemed to Damen. He must have kept his calendar meticulously in his cell phone, though even this Damen didn't see in his hand often. Maybe it was all in his head.

Usually he would return to the loft at the end of the day, still impeccable in his fine clothes, and make himself a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchen. Then he would fetch a book from one of the shelves in the living room and retire to his bedroom without so much as a glance in Damen's direction.

Technically, this suited Damen's purposes just fine. And even though he got the distinct sense that Laurent didn't trust him to so much as re-shelve a book properly, Laurent also didn't appear to have any problem leaving Damen alone and unsupervised in his home. Which meant that while Laurent may not have trusted him, he also didn't have any real sense of why he shouldn't.

Damen used this to his advantage. Every day when Laurent left the loft, Damen thoroughly searched some new part of it. Within his first week, he had looked through every book in the living room, every cabinet, corner, or cubby in the place. Within the first day, he had done a full investigation of his own room, but of course, he hadn't found anything there.

In fact, he hadn't found anything anywhere.

Every book in the living room was innocuous and innocent enough. Histories, economics, biographies of important people from ages past. Dry and intense, but nothing damning, and nothing at all about the corporation for which Laurent lived his entire life. Meetings, phone calls, long nights spent working on business strategy -- and yet none of it was reflected in Laurent's apartment.

After a few days, Damen wondered if Laurent kept all of these more personal things in his own room, and so one day, when Laurent snapped that he would not be back until late at night and that he didn't want to see Damen when he arrived, Damen took the chance.

He'd half expected Laurent to have locked his private room, whether because he feared just such an incursion, or simply because he was clearly a private man. But he didn't. Damen felt an excited buzz move up from his fingers through his body as the door swung silently open for him. But it soon became apparent why Laurent hadn't bothered to lock away the contents of his bedroom: there was hardly anything there to lock away.

As in the rest of the loft, a wealth of art had been placed around the room, the same eclectic mix of painting styles and sculpture, though Damen noted that these tended more toward the abstract than the figurative.

To his surprise, the room wasn't so much bigger than his own. In fact, it was alike in nearly every way: the same comfortable queen bed, the same private bathroom tucked into one corner. A wardrobe, which Damen searched thoroughly and in which he could find nothing but Laurent's fine, severe clothes.

In the bottom of this, he did find some other, more casual garments. A few simple t-shirts, still high quality but showing it through their make rather than any outward design. Even a pair of jeans, which, after only a few days of being around Laurent (and then only for a few minutes at a time) it was already impossible for Damen to imagine him wearing. Finally, he found a leather jacket with a pair of gloves tucked into the pocket. And this was bewildering, but what it wasn't was a hint as to how Akielos could bring down DeVere Corp. Damen put the jacket back as he'd found it, after taking a moment to admire it, and moved on.

Everywhere it was the same. Nothing that had to do with DeVere Corp. or Laurent's uncle, nothing he could use. Hardly anything that even hinted at a personality, which Damen supposed made a certain sort of sense, since primarily Laurent's personality seemed to be that of an isolated, frozen pond, wrapped in an armor of dense forest.

Every once in a while, he would come across something that seemed utterly anachronistic, as though it belonged to someone else and had only somehow ended up in Laurent's room by accident, like the beautiful leather jacket.

In the bathroom cabinet, there were strips of gauze and alcohol pads, and even a suture kit -- something Damen himself was intimately familiar with, but which it seemed Laurent DeVere should have no use for. Under the bed there were -- perhaps less surprisingly -- more books, but these were old and worn, fictions rather than the practical volumes of the living room. They appeared as though they might be remnants from childhood, though imagining Laurent as a child was just as impossible as imagining him in jeans or stitching someone up in the bathroom.

Damen spent well over two hours digging and searching through everything Laurent seemed to possess. Not because it took him that long to get through it all, but because once he'd been through everything once, he went through it all again.

He told himself he was just being thorough, but in reality, he found himself bitterly disappointed. Already he'd sunk nearly a week into this mission, and what did he have to show for it? A few bruises to his ego, and a week's worth of better sleep than he'd had in years -- neither of which would help Akielos bring down DeVere Corp.

He didn't let himself give up until he'd checked absolutely everywhere he could think to look: the backs of paintings, the bottoms of sculptures, false bottoms in the wardrobe and the dresser (which did exist, he noted, though they were empty).

Either Laurent truly had nothing to hide, or he kept everything worth hiding somewhere else. And since he never brought Damen with him on any of his daily excursions -- and Damen couldn't risk arousing suspicion by insisting that he accompany Laurent when he went out -- Damen was stuck.

The result was that he was left in a state of ungodly boredom. By the end of his first week on the "job," he was confident that he had searched the entire apartment. He'd even gone so far as to test every tile in the bathroom floors, just in case any of them could be pried up and something hidden beneath. And still, he had nothing at all to show for it.

He was beginning to wish Laurent had more need of a real personal assistant, just so he would have something to do.

Out of sheer boredom, he began to read the books in the living room, figuring that learning what his enemy had already learned was as good a use of his time as any. He had flipped through all of the books, of course, on day three of what he was beginning to think of as house arrest. But he hadn't read any of them.

After a few days, he didn't even try to hide it anymore, figuring Laurent had to know he was doing something left alone here all day. Laurent would return in the evenings to find Damen sitting on one of the chairs placed around the entertainment center. He would have helped himself to coffee or tea, balancing the mug on his knee as he read about the rise and fall of the Artesian Empire, or all about the intricacies of economics.

The first time this happened, Damen noticed as he watched Laurent enter the loft, Laurent passed a cool gaze over him, standing still in the doorway. Damen met his eyes, daring him to say he wasn't allowed to read when Laurent was leaving him alone with nothing to do. But Laurent didn't say anything. He merely stalked past, filled himself a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen, and shut himself into his bedroom.

Damen was exasperated, having almost wished to stoke Laurent's anger -- always lurking just beneath his icy surface -- if only for something different, some sort of amusement, the way he might pick at a scab simply for having too much idle time.

At least he could still read.

Over the course of a few more days, coming close now to two weeks locked in this prison of his own making, he worked his way through nearly every book on the shelves that interested him enough to hold his attention. He never made any attempt to hide his reading from Laurent anymore, and Laurent never said a word about it.

Then, one morning when Damen came out of his bedroom to find Laurent already gone for the day (as he often was), he discovered something else too: one of the books from the box under Laurent's bed, left on the seat of the chair where Damen had been sitting to read the night before. Some fantastical thing, with a silly title and a fearsome beast on the cover. The spine was cracked in several places, and many of the pages were creased and wrinkled.

Damen got himself a cup of coffee from the kitchen and settled down to read, some new and terrible feeling beginning to grow in his belly. He told himself it was the coffee and ignored it.

For the rest of that day, he did nothing but read. He didn't eat, he didn't take a shower. After a few hours, he found that his back had begun to hurt somewhere between chapter ten and chapter twelve, and he stood up to pace around the loft to continue for a while. When he sat back down, he chose a different chair. Finally, he understood why Laurent kept so many right in the same place.

Late that night, before Laurent returned home, Damen finished the book. He set it down gently on the arm of the chair and wiped at his eyes. The last chapter had affected him, and as he emerged from the world of the story and back into the world of Laurent's loft, he felt as though he had lived through weeks rather than hours.

The story had surprised him, full of magic and political intrigue, but also love and friendship -- things Damen had a hard time associating with Laurent. He went to the kitchen to make himself some food, the first meal he'd eaten all day, and brought the book with him, primarily to keep it close by. He didn't want to relinquish it yet. And, he realized, he wanted Laurent to know he had read it. But Laurent still wasn't home by midnight, and Damen remembered he'd never said exactly when he would be back. Finally, he chided himself for being ridiculous and he went to bed.

But the next morning, when Damen finally dragged himself out of bed (something he did later and later every day, since it didn't seem especially important to do anything) Laurent was still there.

This hadn't happened once during Damen's entire two-week stay there at the loft. Every morning he rose, showered in his private bathroom, dressed himself in the fine new clothes Laurent had at some point stocked in his wardrobe, and came out into the loft to find that Laurent had already left for the day. On this day, however, when he left his bedroom, he stopped short.

Not expecting to see Laurent for hours, if at all, Damen had thought it might be nice to have his morning coffee waiting for him when he got out of the shower. However, he'd had this thought as he'd been about to get into the shower.

So he'd wrapped himself in a towel at the waist, just in case (and because the walls were made of windows, nevermind the fact that they were on the seventy-second floor) and gone out into the loft. Only to find Laurent, sitting at the kitchen island, his cup of morning coffee still full and sitting in front of him, the morning's newspaper spread out on the surface of the island, and a pair of sharp, wide-framed black glasses perched on his nose.

Laurent looked up as Damen stepped into the room, holding the towel at his waist. Laurent's face didn't change at all, but for a long, drawn-out moment, he didn't look away from Damen. And even from across the length of the open loft, Damen was pretty sure he saw Laurent's eyes flick down, once, over his body from behind the lenses of his glasses.

For the first time, Damen considered Laurent's own body. He had noticed it, of course, as part of the overall aesthetic Laurent possessed. But Laurent, to him, had been distant -- even remote -- in all the time Damen had been here.

Now, as they watched each other from a safe distance of ten feet, Damen felt as though he had walked into a room, wearing nothing but a towel, that happened to be housing a snow leopard at the same inconvenient moment. Even so, he couldn't help the reaction his body had to Laurent's, arranged more casually at the island than he'd ever seen it, looking almost comfortable.

There was no question that Laurent was stunning. His soft hair framed his face, which was as finely made as any of the statues scattered around the apartment. His eyes were piercing, even from this distance, and bright with intelligence. And his body hinted at strength, especially in the arms and shoulders and back, though he was compact and lithe. Damen wondered what he would look like, beneath all of the fine things he seemed always to be wearing. Even now, earlier in the day than Damen had ever seen him, he was done up in all his buttons.

Realizing he had allowed his eyes to wander, to linger, Damen's gaze snapped back to Laurent's face. No hint of color in the cheeks, though surely Laurent had realized what Damen had been doing, what he'd been thinking. He met Damen's eyes without a hint of embarrassment -- for either himself or for Damen -- and then he raised one eyebrow. "Well?" he said.

For one shocked instant, Damen thought Laurent was waiting for his assessment of his body. Stunned into silence, Damen said nothing, and then Laurent's eyes flicked to the book still sitting beside him on the island, where Damen had left it after finishing it the night before.

Damen felt his face lift, involuntarily, as he remembered the story, getting swept up in it through the entire day. "I loved it," he said honestly. No reason for strategy there, he told himself. He considered going on, expressing how surprised he'd been to enjoy it so completely, how the ending had taken him totally off guard, but in a way that still made so much sense for the characters. How it had been a long time since he'd gotten so swept up in a story like that, and even longer since that story had come in the shape of a novel -- though this last was probably at least partially because he had been so bored for so many days leading up to it.

But Laurent gave no indication that he was even remotely interested in what Damen had to say. He merely looked back down at the newspaper, as though it barely mattered to him what Damen thought of the book, and Damen bit his tongue from saying any more.

Laurent didn't speak to him again for the rest of the morning. He sat alone at the island, slowly working through his coffee and the newspaper both. He didn't so much as glance at Damen again, even after Damen went back to his room (his own coffee plans abandoned) to shower and get dressed.

But before he left later that morning, Laurent set another book down in the living room.

#

If Damen was a spy for Luarent's uncle, the man was losing his touch. That or he'd decided the best way to get to Laurent was to send in absolutely the most artless person he could find. Maybe Damen had been instructed to bed him? That would explain why he had stepped out that morning clothed in nothing but a glorified loincloth. 

It had not been, he grudgingly admitted to himself, ineffective.

And it would be exactly the sort of game his uncle would play. Send him a hulking, attractive (again, grudging) "personal assistant" to keep an eye on him, bonus points if Laurent melted into him, fucked him, and conveniently lost all objectivity down the line, when it would suit his uncle to use him.

But no, the more Laurent thought about it, the more he doubted Uncle would send him such a man. He would have needed to have very little understanding of Damen in order to think the plan would work quickly and efficiently to his design. Not that Laurent knew Damen well, but he hadn't even insisted he accompany Laurent to his daily meetings, hadn't tried to follow him out. If he'd been sent by Laurent's uncle, he could have and would have done this from the first day.

And surely he would have paraded around his body before now if that had been Uncle's instruction. Unless that had been a last-ditch effort.

Laurent gave what he hoped was an inconsequential shake of his head, trying to throw the memory of Damen's body from his mind. Unfortunately for him, the meeting he found himself in today was among the most boring of all those he'd attended recently -- an acquisitions meeting regarding a buyout of a smaller company, one shark being eaten by another, much larger shark. DeVere Corp. was a megalodon in a sea of mako.

It might have been interesting, if he hadn't been to dozens of such meetings in the last few months -- his uncle's way of trying to bore him out, no doubt, and to keep him from getting too close to anything he cared more personally about.

The fact was, Damen had been living in his apartment for two weeks, and Laurent still didn't know about him one way or the other. He knew enough, certainly, to be wary. But he needed to know how involved, if at all, his uncle had been in Damen's placement with Laurent. And in order to learn that, he needed a plan. Something that would get him the answers he needed without showing his full hand.

Laurent fought the urge to fidget in his seat, and won. Fought the urge to roll his shoulders, stiff after a long night of pacing in the confines of his bedroom (a pastime he used to be able to indulge in the full space of his apartment, but of course -- of course, even his own small space that he'd carved out for himself over the years would be chipped and chipped away from him; his uncle would be assigning him a bedmate soon, if he hadn't already), and won. Fought the urge to think about Damen's face that morning, when Laurent had asked him how he'd liked the book and he'd lit up like a brand new neon sign.

He won that one too. Mostly.

There was no doubt about it: Damen was a question that needed answering, and Laurent couldn't afford to wait any longer.

The meeting droned on around him. Laurent devoted just enough attention to it that he could speak when called upon and give a report to his uncle later, if he was ever asked for one. And by the time he was free to return to his apartment, he had a plan. Enough of one anyway.

With any luck, it might even be sort of fun.

#

Damen could tell something was up as soon as Laurent walked through the door that evening. For one thing, Damen had only made it halfway through the book Laurent had left out for him. He'd only been gone a few hours, when usually he was gone all day.

And for another, as soon as Laurent stalked into the loft, he made direct eye contact with Damen. Typically, if Damen saw Laurent at all in a given day, he ignored Damen's presence entirely. He may as well have been another piece of furniture, or a statue tucked into a corner where Laurent only had to acknowledge him when he chose to.

Now, though, Laurent looked right at Damen, shut (and locked) the door of the loft behind himself as he came in, and said, "I will need your assistance tonight."

Damen stared. For a long moment, Laurent's words did not collect themselves into any sort of meaningful order in his mind. He could give them no context in which they made sense. Finally, he was forced to say, "Assistance?" with a blank sort of sound to his voice.

Laurent had come the rest of the way into the loft by then, and now he stood only a few feet from where Damen still sat with the book open in his hands.

The book Laurent had left for him that morning had been another old, well-loved paperback novel about a fantastic place in some imaginary time. The kind of thing Damen would not have chosen for himself after the age of ten or so. But this one was darker than that of the day before, and he'd been getting into it when Laurent appeared.

"That's what you're here to do, isn't it?" Laurent said now, his voice rich and sweet like dark chocolate even as his tone remained cool, calm, and removed. "Assist me?"

Right. He was meant to be acting as Laurent's personal assistant. He had almost forgotten, as all he'd done since he'd arrived was sit around and read by himself. Laurent had never once tasked him to do anything, not even to check his calendar for him or fetch him the newspaper. Damen knew this could be nothing, but he couldn't help feeling suspicious.

"What are we doing?" he asked.

Laurent had already moved away from him again, heading toward the hall where his own bedroom sat waiting for him, for all the world undisturbed, though Damen had torn through it again since the first time, just in case he'd missed anything (and out of abject boredom).

Laurent turned back to face him. The usually masked expression on his face now betrayed a hint of impatience, even derision. "You," he said, "are going to do what I tell you to do."

Amused despite himself -- really, the thought of Laurent being able to make Damen do anything, no matter what his job was meant to be, was laughable -- Damen said, "And what are you going to do?"

Laurent's eyes narrowed, tension visible through his entire body, from his strong shoulders down to his bone-china wrists, from hip to knee to ankle. For a moment, Damen thought he might watch Laurent explode in slow motion. But he visibly pulled himself back from the brink of anger he had been flirting with, and when he spoke, it was with the same cool inflection he usually sported.

"I will be taking care of some business," he said, and then promptly turned and disappeared down the hall.

He hadn't told Damen to change, so Damen figured what he was wearing must have been good enough. Not wanting to give Laurent the satisfaction of seeing him scramble, and not knowing how to prepare for the "assistance" he was meant to be offering, Damen settled back into the armchair and returned to the book he'd been reading.

It was only a few minutes, though, before Laurent stepped back out into the living room. He hadn't changed either, except that he'd put on a slim-fitting jacket that matched his tailored pants.

Damen didn't bother to disguise his lingering look, or his disdain for the expensive clothing, despite the fact that since he'd moved in here, he'd been obliged to wear it himself. He was just glad Nik couldn't see him here, and that they'd agreed it was too risky to have frequent check-ins (though if Damen had known how much time he was going to spend lounging around the loft, bored and alone, he might have fought more in favor of them).

He would never hear the end of it if Nik were to see him in his stodgy button-down shirts and nicely-pressed trousers. He looked like at any given moment, he was going to walk into a lunch meeting with the CEO of Evil Incorporated. And all for the much more likely probability of walking into the kitchen, alone, to make himself a peanut butter sandwich for the tenth day in a row.

Laurent looked impeccable as always, except that in the time he had been gone into his own room, his face had turned more sour than it had already been. He gave an imperious gesture that Damen should follow him, a lazy wave of his hand. Damen resisted the urge to roll his eyes, barely.

He was about to set the book down, open to his place, on the chair, but then he thought better of it. Laurent seemed like the type who would always use a bookmark, and Damen didn't want to risk having his hand bit off at the wrist. So he made a mental note of his page and set the book down gently before following Laurent out of the apartment.

He didn't realize until he was out in the hall that it had been over two weeks since he'd so much as stepped one foot out of the loft. He felt his shoulders adjust themselves, releasing tension immediately, and he knew he must be grinning, because Laurent's face changed again in response.

He led the way to the elevator and said, "You're not my prisoner," as though this were obvious, as though Damen could have gone anywhere he'd wanted every day since he'd arrived.

And for the first time, something slotted into place for him. Laurent hadn't been leaving him behind to wait on his beck and call. Laurent had simply not cared what he did. Laurent didn't want him here, had no use for him (until now, apparently). Laurent didn't even know what to do with him.

Damen almost laughed. "Why did you hire me?" he asked.

Being outside the apartment and having this little epiphany left him feeling light enough to float, though that may have had something to do with the speed with which they were falling toward the first floor. He felt as though he'd been in a strange dream, another dimension, and now he had emerged back into real life, where he was Damen, head of Akielos, and Laurent was his target, his way into DeVere Corp. Somehow he had gotten so wrapped up in the fiction that he had lost himself entirely. He had to play the role better.

Laurent regarded him with his own degree of suspicion now. "I didn't," he said, as though this might be a trick or a trap of some kind, and he didn't know what Damen meant to get out of it.

Somewhere between the seventieth and the second floor, the air in the small space of the elevator had grown heavy. But before Damen could say anything else, ask what Laurent meant that he hadn't hired Damen himself, the doors opened into the lobby of the building.

There was no more chance to talk after that, not right away. Laurent led Damen quickly to the parking garage beneath the ground floor, and before he knew it, Laurent had opened the driver's side door of a sleek, shining black car the likes of which Damen had only ever dreamed of.

It was beautiful, a paragon of its kind as Laurent was a paragon of the human species. In that way, it was well-suited to Laurent, but in most others, it seemed strange, wrapped around him as it was once he'd settled himself into the driver's seat.

Damen climbed into the seat beside him, spared the awkward decision-making of whether he should be spiteful and sit in the back by the fact that there was no back seat. Damen had never seen a car with only two seats before, and he realized this must be a design feature meant for sporty, intensely wealthy people. No one on his side of town would be able to afford to drive a mile in this thing.

He couldn't help looking at Laurent. Somehow he looked utterly different in this setting, despite being surrounded by the same luxury as he'd always been upstairs. But seeing him in a car seemed to make him more human -- and younger. Or maybe that was just the effect of this car in particular. It was, almost, too big for him in a way, highlighting how much smaller he was than Damen, though he was probably of average size really.

For the first time, Damen considered Laurent's age. He knew exactly how old he was: just a few months shy of twenty-one. He knew because Laurent's twenty-first birthday was the day he was meant to come into his inheritance of his father's company.

But this was the first time he had ever really looked his age to Damen. A shining, beautiful youth, in a shining, beautiful car, a touch of glory all wrapped up in the wealth and power of the machine he was about to drive into the night.

In another time, Damen thought, in another place, if they were any other two people, Damen might have laughed then, and Laurent might have met his eyes with a grin, and they might have torn out of the garage together, as exactly what they were in their simplest forms: two young men, both restless and reckless from being cooped up inside for too long. And who knew what might have happened then?

Maybe they could have even come to be -- not friends, necessarily, but friendly.

Beside him, Laurent's attention had snagged, and he'd stopped moving once he had the key in the ignition. "What?" he said, looking as though he'd just bitten into a lemon when he'd been expecting an apple.

Damen didn't answer right away, and while he couldn't have said how, exactly, Laurent's expression changed, shifted, in the bright light and deep shadows cast by the small light overhead. It softened, and something like curiosity seemed to open in it, even as the expression itself became no more readable.

"You're staring," Laurent prompted.

Damen shook his head. "Just thinking how strange it is to see you behind the wheel of a car," he said.

"Did you think I flew everywhere on invisible wings?" Laurent said.

But really, Damen had not thought much about where Laurent went during the days, only that he left the apartment and didn't come back.

Living in the lap of luxury really had softened his mind, he realized, with a healthy dose of bewilderment. He should have been pestering Laurent to bring him along, even if it did seem futile to start an argument with him. At first, he had been happy to have free reign over the place, so he could search it. But then he'd simply fallen into the routine -- and he'd enjoyed having the time to read, he thought, chagrined.

Some of this must have shown on his face, or maybe Laurent simply lost patience with him. He turned away from Damen, his hands on the wheel, and in an instant, they were out of the parking space, then out of the garage, and then tearing down the city streets.

Damen, breathless and winded from the speed of it, laughed just a little. Now he was convinced he was dreaming. To see Laurent looking so small and human, not vulnerable but real, behind the wheel of the car -- of this car, specifically, this magnificent thing -- had been strange enough. To see him speeding through the city -- the real world -- as though he had been born to drive was something else entirely.

Who was this man? Damen asked himself, and almost asked aloud. He would have, if he hadn't just reprimanded himself for getting lost in the quagmire of this job. He was here for a purpose, and no matter how thrilled he was to be in the car with someone as beautiful as Laurent, he couldn't forget who Laurent was.

Because while apparently he was the type of person to possess this utterly impractical car, and the type of person to drive it without a care for laws or society or, it seemed, his own safety, he was also the heir to DeVere Corp., a company that had spent the last several years slowly taking over the city, turning and twisting people to its will. Damen could not afford to let himself forget that, no matter how his body swooped and soared with adrenaline and the pure joy of flying through the city over the late-night streets.

"What about curfew?" Damen asked, suppressing the urge to yell -- it felt like the time to be loud, even though the engine ran so quietly he wouldn't even have known how fast they were going if not for the blur of neon signs outside the windows.

Laurent gave his head a little shake, a poised and precise gesture that Damen could easily see translated into a lazy hand, if his hands hadn't been busy. That gesture meant he didn't care about the curfew. It meant the curfew didn't matter, not to him or not to people like him.

And again, Damen remembered Laurent's position, his privilege, the wealth he had known his entire life. All of the good things that had been presented to him on a platter from the moment he'd been born, the safety and security he'd been handed for free, when almost everyone else in this place had grown up needing to fight for scraps of it, as Damen had, as all of his friends and family had.

No, it was impossible to divorce the stunning young man beside him from the life he had known. It colored and shaped every aspect: the curl of his lip when he saw something distasteful, the cool arrogance that came from believing he'd earned everything he possessed, that he was entitled to it, with no acknowledgment of the fact that he'd only gotten it through the long labor of others.

Still, even these sobering thoughts couldn't sap the drive of joy for Damen. It had been weeks, now, since he'd been inside a car, and longer still since he'd been racing in one, even though now all they were racing against was the itch beneath skin -- for speed, for the push of the engine, for more. Damen knew it well, and while surprised to recognize it in Laurent now, there was no denying its presence. It called between their bodies in silent communication that had nothing to do with who they were or where they'd come from.

Damen's eyes couldn't or wouldn't remain still. They sped between the windshield, watching the front of the car devour the pavement ahead of them, and the windows, the flash of neon and light reflected from towering glass buildings like the one where Laurent lived. And to Laurent, whose mouth seemed to tighten now as he shifted gears.

Laurent was suppressing a smile, Damen understood, even though he didn't think he'd ever seen Laurent smile before. He wondered when he had come to know the man well enough to read his face, even if he had only the fluency of a third-learned language, still in the early stages.

"You keep staring," Laurent said, narrowing his eyes at the road. He didn't sound necessarily displeased, more plaintive than anything.

"I just," Damen began, and then paused to find the right words. Reminded himself again who they were, and why they were here. "I wouldn't have expected to see you driving a car like this," he landed on eventually.

Laurent said only, "It was my brother's."

Damen hadn't even known Laurent had a brother. Something about the finality with which he'd delivered this news told Damen not to ask about him.

For a few more minutes, they continued on through the mostly-empty city. It was a weeknight, so the curfew was early: 10 PM for most people, 11 for those with special permission given the nature of their jobs or their families. Laurent and Damen had the streets to themselves. And in a way, even when they lapsed back into silence, it was almost pleasant, to sit in the small space together, to share the ride and the night.

Seeing Laurent here, his hands strong and sure on the wheel, bright blues and pinks and purples from the signs outside splayed here and there over his face, catching in his eyes, Damen began to wonder if the Laurent he knew from the loft was not Laurent's most natural form at all.

He had assumed it would be, since that was Laurent's home, but he seemed far more comfortable here than he ever had in the apartment. The tension he usually draped around himself like another well-fitted garment had been left behind in the parking garage.

Now he held himself still and precise behind the wheel, but there was an ease to him that Damen had never seen before. His guard was still up, that much was obvious by his silence and the way he barely glanced in Damen's direction, but it was as though Damen had joined him finally, in his own world.

When they eventually stopped driving, it was to pull into a parking garage almost exactly like the one they had just left, crouched beneath another glass sky rise, also almost exactly like the one they had just left. Laurent slammed the door as he stepped elegantly out of the car. Damen almost didn't realize he was meant to follow Laurent out, and then he scrambled, as graceless as Laurent was put-together, out into the garage, shutting his door with an echo in the quiet space.

As he followed Laurent through the garage and into the lobby of the building, Damen thought at first that he had somehow missed the fact that they'd driven in a large loop and come right back to the same place. Except he trusted his own internal sense of direction too much for that, and the tiles in the lobby here were red instead of blue.

"Where are we?" he asked, realizing only as he heard his own voice that he was whispering. No one else was in the lobby. They were alone.

Laurent looked back over his shoulder, a calculating look on his face. Suspicious, curious, confident in his ability to peel back every layer Damen possessed. Damen was only slightly more confident that he couldn't, quite. Though every second that passed had him less sure.

"This is my uncle's building," Laurent said. "We're breaking in."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damen and Laurent break into DeVere's offices. Laurent gets some alone time.

Damen seemed to process Laurent's statement -- that they were breaking into his uncle's offices -- quickly enough. Even gamely, if also openly.

Could the quickly-quashed surprise on his face be an act? No matter. Finding out was already on the agenda. In the meantime, the man's brute strength would be useful.

Fortunately most of Uncle's staff was busy with preparations for his new pet project and they weren't bustling around the office floors as they might have been, even at this late hour. Laurent hurried into the elevator and out of it again, Damen hulking (though admittedly, he moved with a degree of grace) behind him, several floors above the ground. "Mr. DeVere" wouldn't be here himself, of course, but so much the better.

Laurent forcibly turned his thoughts away from him, and instead aimed the shards of his attention where they were needed: the halls around them, Damen at his back, what he needed to find, what he needed to know.

The office floors of his uncle's building were bland, boring, intentionally crafted to be both functional and innocuous. Any secrets Laurent might find here were hidden here because of the thin, beige carpet, the rows and rows of identical doors covering up identical offices, filled with more rows of filing cabinets and desktop computers all scrubbed of any sign of personal use.

Laurent had never been here alone before. That is, without an escort from his uncle -- unless that was exactly what Damen was. He glanced back at Damen quickly, hoping to catch him in an unguarded moment. His eyes were roaming the halls, as Laurent's had been, and yet Laurent had the sense that he, too, had carefully measured his attention, and that a healthy dose of it rested solidly on Laurent, like a hand at the small of his back.

He suppressed a shudder and moved on. Only one thing could be done about the question of who Damen really worked for, and Laurent was doing it now. That was all.

Though he had not spent much time here in recent years, Laurent knew more or less where he needed to go. It would be a waste to check his uncle's own office, so he wouldn't bother there. The man hardly spent any time here, and he would never be stupid enough to leave anything incriminating lying around, no matter how well hidden he thought he'd made it.

Fortunately for Laurent, not everyone in his uncle's employ had the intelligence of the man himself.

He headed straight for Guion's office, always remaining carefully aware of Damen behind him. Despite this, it still sent a series of shocked tingles down his entire body when Damen lightly touched the tip of one finger to Laurent's shoulder. Laurent spun, knowing there was fury in his face and managing only to tamp it down to icy impatience before he met Damen's eyes.

But Damen wasn't concerned with him or his mood. He quickly moved the same finger to his own lips, gesturing for silence, before pointing up to a security camera perched a little further down the hall. Of course, Laurent had known the camera was there. It couldn't be helped. It was one of the reasons this move had been a risk, but no one had ever won a game by standing still.

He couldn't speak to explain any of this. Human voices would be caught by the camera even if there was nobody else to hear them, and any one of these closed doors may yet be hiding some diligent worker putting in overtime.

Instead of speaking, then, Laurent quirked an eyebrow, knowing Damen would recognize it for the challenge it was, and sauntered down the hall, dripping with insouciance. When he reached the level of the security camera, turning to face one section of the hall and then the other, he paused to watch its movement for a moment.

If he'd had any doubt before, he knew now that there would be little to find here. The camera was mostly for show. It only existed here at all because not to have one would have been more conspicuous. This confirmed Laurent's suspicion that if there had been much here to find -- or, rather, if his uncle believed there to be -- Laurent would never have gotten this far in the first place.

But his uncle was a man, like any man, and he made mistakes. Chief among his most common were those regarding his expectations of others. Underestimating his enemies, and overestimating his friends.

Besides, Laurent's purposes here tonight were two-fold.

Confident that he knew the pattern of the camera's movements, Laurent waited until it faced just away from him, pressed himself to the wall beneath it, and followed its path down the hall, carefully keeping his body out of its line of sight. Then, as it turned back toward the direction he'd come from, he darted out of its range at the other end of the hall. He faced Damen and stood as though waiting to see what he would do.

This should be no problem for him, of course, despite the fact that he was considerably larger than Laurent. Larger than most people, Laurent corrected himself, with a comforting hint of disdain, and a far less familiar feeling just beneath that, which he pushed aside. He had neither the time nor the inclination to be assessing uncomfortable emotions at the moment, thank you.

From the opposite end of the hall, Damen regarded him with amusement. In fact, Laurent might go so far as to say the man was laughing at him, though silently. He grit his teeth and didn't rise to the bait, though it was harder than he would have admitted.

But sure enough, as the camera repeated its movements, Damen slunk by quickly and easily, and in a moment, he stood beside Laurent with the hint of a smile on his face. More than a hint. In fact, it was so disarmingly open, his amusement and pleasure in the task so evident in his expression, that Laurent caught himself staring into it for a moment, like a door someone had opened onto a secret garden, all beckoning warmth and sunlight. This man was either the worst spy Laurent had ever seen, or the most terrifyingly charming and effective. 

He turned sharply on his heel, gathering himself back together, and gave a lazy flick of his wrist to gesture that Damen should follow, just for good measure.

#

Damen tried hard not to be amused by Laurent's showy antics, but it was a losing battle. He had no idea what Laurent was up to. Some sort of prank on his uncle, or his uncle's colleagues? At moments, he seemed to be taking all of this, and himself, very seriously.

But then there were times, like when he snuck past the security camera, when he seemed almost to be playing, and in these moments, it seemed that what he really wanted from Damen was to play along.

Maybe Damen had been cooped up in Laurent's fancy apartment for so long that it had started to get to him, making him feel trapped and cooped up, because he was all too happy to oblige Laurent's whims and games. It felt good to use his body, even if it was just to sneak around a stodgy office building.

Scents of lemon cleaner and copy paper followed them as they stalked silently through the halls. Damen believed Laurent had a specific destination in mind, and when they came upon a door with the name "Guion" displayed on a plate, Laurent stopped and proved Damen right.

Laurent tried the doorknob, but it was locked. He looked to Damen, and for a moment Damen thought he might be embarrassed: to have come all this way for some silly joke, only to be locked out of the room he needed. But no, there was no trace of shame or silliness in Laurent's expression, only cool calculation, and then, after a second spent regarding Damen's arms in his shirt sleeves, a hint of a very different kind of amusement.

"Shall I pick the lock," Laurent said, "or would you like to force the door from its hinges?"

Despite himself, Damen started to smile. He gestured a sweeping hand toward the door, as though to say  _ Be my guest _ . And then Laurent promptly and elegantly dropped to his knees.

They had been standing close, both ready to dip into the door as soon as it opened, in case it hadn't been locked, and so on the floor, Laurent was right beside Damen, though facing away from him to work on the lock. Again, Damen felt himself react before he could control it. His breath caught, for just a moment, and an uncomfortable prick of warmth stabbed at his belly.

But Laurent, who had produced a small leather wallet from his pocket, was now distracted by busily -- and quickly, Damen noted -- plying the lock with the pick, a tension wrench held in his left hand while he probed inside the lock with the other. He had his eyes closed as he worked, his face still and perfect in concentration. He looked very like a marble statue. Damen wondered, if he were to reach out and brush one finger over Laurent's cheek, whether the skin would be warm or cool.

Berating himself, he forced his eyes away from Laurent's face and instead to his hands, which were still working. Damen was about to make a crack about how lockpicking wasn't as easy as it sounded in books (not that Damen had ever had much patience for it himself -- Laurent had been correct that when he'd found himself in similar situations before, he usually opted for the simpler approach and kicked in the door; in his own circles, it usually didn't matter, at that point, whether anyone knew he was coming) when there was an audible click.

Laurent opened his eyes, withdrew the pick, and this time when he turned the knob, the door swung open without so much as a squeak.

In what was coming to be a common theme of the evening, Damen found himself surprised by Laurent's competence. He looked down at him, maybe to smile, maybe to compliment him on a job well done, he hadn't decided yet. Only when he looked, he saw that Laurent was already looking up at him, still on his knees before the now-open doorway. The lighting in the nighttime office halls was dim, but Damen thought he could see a faint flush to Laurent's face that hadn't been there before.

The moment lasted a fraction of a second, and yet when Laurent stood gracefully and moved into the room beyond, it continued playing, endless, in Damen's mind.

Laurent went directly to the computer on the desk and turned it on. Now that they were here, it seemed he had no use for Damen. In fact, Damen realized for the first time, in the wake of Laurent's apparent lockpicking abilities, Laurent hadn't needed him at all so far. He had arrived here without any need of Damen whatsoever, he'd known exactly where to go inside the building, he had skirted the security camera before Damen had, and he'd gotten himself into this room.

Unsure whether he ought to feel entertained by Laurent's charades or unsettled -- knowing this could mean anything from Laurent merely wanting company, or a witness, or that he had planned to use Damen as some sort of scapegoat -- Damen figured there was nothing to do now but what he had been doing all along: go along with it.

Laurent had sat down in the chair at the desk, and Damen now moved to stand beside him, to see what he was doing. Laurent's fingers scrambled over the keyboard. On the screen, a small box asked for the password to get into the computer. In a moment, Laurent had passed it, even quicker than he’d managed the lock on the door. 

Did he have some magical ability to get into places he wasn't supposed to be? Damen huffed out a laugh, making sure to keep himself quiet. It sounded, to his own ears, as admiring as it did amused. He hoped Laurent didn't notice.

"How did you know his password?" he asked.

"I know the names of his sons," Laurent said, already distractedly moving on to the next step. "And their birthdays."

Damen shook his head. In the back of his mind, he privately hoped his people never had to come up against Laurent directly. If the man took this much deliberate care in planning out a simple prank, he would hate to see how he would attack a real threat.

Here, too, Laurent seemed to know where he was going. He clicked through folders quickly, scanning documents with his eyes as though reading all those books gave him enough practice that he had only to glance at a page to know what it said. Damen thought about asking what he was looking for, but he didn't think a personal assistant would especially care, and he didn't want to seem too interested.

Still, his own eyes flicked between the computer screen -- where he could catch no more than a word or two at a time, before Laurent would close one document and open another -- and Laurent himself, watching his hands move, his eyes focused on the screen with the deep, full concentration with which he seemed to regard most things, from his morning coffee to Damen himself, on the rare occasions when he bothered to look at him at all.

Damen wondered if he approached all things in life with that same intensity, and the image came to Damen of Laurent in the hallway, on his knees, eyes locked on Damen's and a pink flush spreading over the apples of his cheeks.

He was going to get himself into trouble, thinking that way. Not only with Laurent either. Besides, a part of him knew that Laurent was more likely to bite and scratch than anything else he might be doing on his knees. Damen shook his head, though he couldn't quite bring himself to wish he had sent Kastor here in his place. He didn't look at that thought too closely.

Just then, Laurent gave some small sign -- Damen couldn't even have said what it was; a renewed tension in his shoulders, a sharp stutter in his breath -- that told Damen he'd found what he'd been looking for, and at last Damen's curiosity won out.

He turned his eyes to the screen, where Laurent had pulled up another document. It was a spreadsheet, labeled something innocuous and meaningless. It clearly showed the movement of funds to and from various accounts, though what any of the accounts might be, Damen couldn't have guessed. It didn't look as though the spreadsheet was meant for any sort of official use. Rather, it was for the personal use of this Guion, or maybe between him and others of his rank.

Did it show evidence of embezzlement somehow? Could that be what had Laurent so excited? Because there was no doubt that he was excited now, though he kept himself as strapped down as ever. Tension poured from him, but when Damen glanced at his face there was a gleam of private triumph there, in the set of his mouth, the glitter of his eyes.

But no. No one would be foolish enough to leave evidence like that lying around on their computer, password or no. Damen looked back to the spreadsheet, trying to determine what exactly it showed, and why it had Laurent so worked up.

Damen knew his way around logistics and planning, even money. He had to, as the head of Akielos. But ultimately, they dealt more in action than in capital. He was less familiar with this aspect of business and corporations than he would have liked.

Laurent, however, taken by some magnanimous mood in the wake of his success, maybe, spoke then, for Damen's benefit. "You see this column?" he said, pointing to a column denoted with a crimson red, but otherwise no label. Most of the other columns were labeled with some string of numbers and letters that must have meant something to whoever made the spreadsheet, but nothing at all to Damen.

Damen nodded, leaning forward over Laurent’s shoulder for a better look.

"This denotes my uncle's favorite project. And see here," Laurent pointed to a few other columns, all of which showed diminishing returns on investments. Then Laurent pointed to where the numbers in the crimson column swelled. So not embezzlement, nothing technically illegal, but DeVere was taking money from various aspects of the company to feed into his own pet project.

"No reason to do that," Damen said, "if the company shareholders are in agreement on what your uncle's project should cost."

"No, there isn't," Laurent agreed. He turned then in his chair to face Damen, again looking up at him with those bright blue eyes, now hard and shining with a sense of victory that Damen knew now he had never seen in them before. Their weeks together re-contextualized themselves in his mind as he stared. Faced with this sense of triumph now, he began to wonder if what he had been seeing until this moment was defeat.

As they looked at each other, something shifted. Something between them, something in Laurent's face. Replacing the victory was a sort of curiosity, as though Laurent, having achieved his own purpose, now wanted to see what Damen would do.

Before he had a chance to do anything, however, the sound of a door opening down the hall sent a shock of ice down Damen's spine. For an instant, he froze, listening. Two voices, maybe a dozen yards away. Damen thought back through the schematics of what he'd seen of the building. Based on their distance, what he remembered of the hall, and the time of night, his best guess was that they were security guards, patrolling around the building and just come onto this floor from the stairwell.

"Security," he whispered to Laurent, trusting that they were still far enough down the hall that they wouldn't be heard.

Laurent's open expressed closed off. He shut out of the spreadsheet and turned off the computer. Damen must have his own confusion on his face -- didn't Laurent need that, wasn't that why they had come? -- because Laurent gave a tiny shake of his head. "No time," he said.

Damen nodded, though really, shady money handling or not, it wasn't as though Laurent needed to worry, especially about the security guards. Or did he? For the first time, it occurred to Damen that perhaps things between Laurent and his uncle weren't as comfortable as he'd assumed. Certainly Laurent had gone very still since the guards had made their presence known. Listening, calculating. Then he turned in the chair to face Damen.

"Well," he said. "Assist me."

Damen merely stared at Laurent for a long moment, uncomprehending.

Laurent tolerated this for about two seconds, before he spoke again. "That personal passion project my uncle is funding with rerouted money -- do you know what it is? He hasn't been shy about it."

Damen thought back, all the while listening to the guards down the hall. They had gone the other direction, for now. And it seemed that he did remember something, some flash on TV, DeVere talking about his latest philanthropic endeavor (all too little too late, by a mile and a half).

"Some sort of teen center?" Damen said, still making sure to keep his voice low, unsure why Laurent deemed this necessary to discuss right now, when there were security guards out there and a beautiful, cozy car downstairs where they could talk as much as they liked.

"I think you'll find that the wording is 'youth center' -- teens are too old for my uncle to bother going to such lengths for easy access."

He said this with his eyes locked on Damen's, giving weight to the words. Still, it took Damen a moment to catch up to him, the full, horrible meaning of what he was saying only landing on him slowly, one precise point at a time, like a hawk coming to perch on his shoulder. His stomach did a slow, nauseous roll in his body, and his mind raced with everything this new information brought to light.

Laurent wasn't here to play some silly prank, and he couldn't be caught by those security guards. His uncle couldn't know he was snooping around, or he would be removed from DeVere Corp.'s operations immediately. Even more than he already was. The meetings, the fact that Laurent lived and worked in a building on the other side of the city, when DeVere himself, and everyone who worked closely with him, all of the higher management was here, on the west side.

Laurent was being held at arm's length from his own family's company. From his  _ own _ company. The one he was set to inherit in just a few months. But of course, now it seemed obvious: DeVere had no intention of allowing Laurent to take over. He was trying to force him out. And Laurent was fighting back, in the only way he could. By playing along during the day, and at night looking for secret evidence he could use to his advantage.

Damen didn't like DeVere Corp., and he would as soon have seen it torn to the ground for the evil it did in his city. The disparities of wealth that it perpetuated. But still, he couldn't help feeling a little sorry for Laurent, who had no one to fight with him, alongside him. Damen had never been alone like that in his life.

Well, Laurent wasn't alone now. Damen would get him out of here, with those security guards none the wiser, and DeVere would never know Laurent had been here, would never know he had seen that spreadsheet.

Down the hall, in the opposite direction from the one where they'd come, the security guards were finishing their circuit of the floor. It made more sense to let them pass and sneak out after them, when they had moved on to another floor, than to try to move past them now. Damen crept silently to the door to listen.

They clearly had no reason to think anyone else was in the building, at least not anyone who shouldn't have been there. Their voices were hushed as they spoke, but only in the way people naturally lowered their voices when a room was dim and quiet, as though not wanting to add too much noise themselves. They didn't seem at all suspicious.

Damen turned to gesture to Laurent that he should follow, only to find Laurent already waiting behind him. He had moved as silently across the floor as Damen himself had. If Damen had less training, he would have visibly startled. As it was, based on the faintest hint of an amused smirk on Laurent's lip, he had given at least some reaction, and Laurent was pleased with himself for it. Damen felt a wry grin try to spread on his own face, and he only just caught it. Still, he doubted Laurent had missed its enthusiastic beginnings.

He turned away to face the now-empty hallway, rather than continuing to gaze into Laurent's mysterious and admittedly distracting countenance.

With the security guards gone onto the next floor (no way of knowing whether they were working their way up or down), there was no better time than now for Damen and Laurent to make their move. They couldn't risk the elevator, because it would make too much noise when they didn't know where the security guards would be. Damen led Laurent to the stairs.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, it occurred to Damen that Laurent had been more than happy to lead the way ever since they'd arrived at the building, and that it was somewhat strange that he was content to follow Damen now.

But Damen didn't know what to make of it, and he didn't have the time to consider it when he had to make sure they both escaped the building without being detected. If they did that, they would have plenty of time for Damen's questions, and he would get answers out of Laurent whether the other man wanted him to or not.

They made it to the stairwell easily and without incident, skirting by the security camera in much the same way as they had before. Damen even managed to convince himself the security guards must have been moving up the building, rather than down, as he and Laurent sped down the stairs, floor after floor, without meeting anyone else or hearing any sign of other occupants in the building.

Knowing he was showing off a little bit, Damen held Laurent back before they exited the stairwell at the ground level where it would spit them out into the lobby. Laurent huffed when he met Damen's braced arm, but Damen thought it was partially in annoyance and partially in good humor. He turned away to hide his own smile. Then he opened the door into the lobby a crack and peered out. He didn't see anyone, and the security camera here was pointed only toward the main entrance to the street. He hadn't even seen it before because, approaching from the garage, it had been hidden by a central front desk, which wasn't manned at this hour.

He didn't see anyone, so he opened the door further and slipped out, Laurent following close behind him. They had made it about halfway across the lobby, heading for the garage entrance, when Damen heard the murmur of voices fast approaching.

Instinct took over. Laurent's revelation about his uncle, about the "youth center" and his uncle's purpose for building it, had changed this for Damen. It was no longer a game to him. It seemed important, essential, that he get Laurent out of here without his uncle realizing what he'd been up to. If DeVere knew what Laurent knew, he would be able to change things, move the money, hide his motivations better. In short, they would lose the only advantage they had against him.

He didn't stop to think about what that might mean for him, or how it changed his own mission, his own reason for being here in the first place. There wasn't time for that now.

Instead, he grabbed Laurent around the shoulders, dragged him toward the desk at the center of the lobby, and threw them both bodily to the ground. He did at least have the forethought to fall first himself, pulling Laurent down on top of him, rather than the other way around. Alone, he would have done this with some degree of professionalism. As it was, he hit his head rather hard against the tile floor, and it was a lucky thing he did.

If he hadn't had the sudden, sharp pounding in his skull to focus on, he would surely have found himself in an awkward state. Laurent landed heavily on top of him, pressed shoulder to knee against his body.

Immediately, and indignantly, Laurent moved to push himself up, and again acting on instinct, Damen tightened his hold, just for a second, and then let go to press a finger to his lips. The security guards he had heard speaking somewhere close by now stepped into the lobby from some other door out of sight. As long as they didn't come to check the desk, Laurent and Damen should remain safely out of sight. But if they moved at all, or made any noise, they would certainly be spotted. Making it out now meant making it through however many moments they had to remain pressed tightly to each other on the cold tile floor.

Laurent's eyes were wide and shocked on Damen's for about half a second before he carefully rearranged his features to present only cold disdain, as though there was nowhere else on the planet he would like less to be. Which was probably true.

For Damen's part, he could feel his body reacting. Laurent may have been obnoxious and spoiled and mean-spirited, but for all the charm his personality lacked, his body made up in abundance. Fortunately, Damen's blood flow was interrupted by the growing bruise on the back of his head, and didn't betray him. Still, his breath didn't come easily into his lungs, and he knew he couldn't entirely blame the shock of the fall or Laurent's weight on his chest.

From this close, Laurent looked perhaps even more beautiful, the skin of his face and neck so fair and fine that even in the low light, Damen could see faint traces of blue vein beneath it. If Laurent had been a statue, rather than a man, he might have been tempted to brush his fingers along them, like drawn rivers on a map, following them over his body to their source.

It would be far too easy to lose himself entirely in the gem-like blue of Laurent's eyes, so instead Damen found himself staring at his lips -- which were soft and parted in surprise, for that one moment before Laurent strapped them back into their hard line -- before finally he determined to look over Laurent's shoulder at the wall instead, for his own safety. Even this couldn't distract from the feel of Laurent's body, however, hard and strong against his, even as it was smaller and more compact.

He had to get out of here. Even his throbbing head could only distract him so much.

Fortunately, before he could do something utterly stupid (though he was sure Laurent would have argued that it was too late to avoid that fate), the security guards finished their cursory sweep of the lobby and disappeared back into the belly of the building, leaving Damen and Laurent alone again.

Now Laurent did push himself up and away, practically scrambling back up to his feet. Or at least it would have been scrambling if someone else had done it. He straightened his jacket and walked off in the direction of the parking garage and the car, his body held as rigidly as ever. Damen laughed a little, only to himself, and shook his head.

Back in the garage, they had no further trouble, and in a moment, Laurent was seated once more behind the wheel of his brother's sleek black car, and Damen was beside him in the passenger seat, thinking over the larger implications of everything they had just done.

Everything he had learned over the last hour stumbled through his mind, small facts and revelations tripping over each other for attention. He didn't know what to make of any of it. He had the sense that everything fit together somehow, into a larger image, each new bit of information a puzzle piece that could somehow come together to form a picture, if he could only fit the right edges together.

DeVere and his plans for the youth center, his moving of the money to hide his real intentions from at least some of the shareholders in the company, the fact that he was keeping Laurent as far from the true heart of the business as possible. Because he thought of Laurent as a threat? Was Laurent trying to bring down his uncle? Had that been the purpose of this evening's little adventure?

But in that case, why bring Damen? He'd never brought Damen with him anywhere before. And he hadn't left the building with any proof, only knowledge. Knowledge Laurent, at least, had already possessed, or at least suspected. He'd known exactly what to look for. Damen had been the one left surprised.

As these thoughts turned themselves over in his mind, the words Damen found himself speaking aloud were not the ones he had expected to say. But when he spoke, Laurent only glanced at him from the corner of his eye, perhaps weighing an answer.

"What happened to your brother?" Damen asked.

Laurent took so long to answer, Damen was sure he'd made a fatal misstep. He was more disappointed by that idea than he would have been a few hours earlier.

In the end, though, Laurent merely took his time. Whether he took the moment to tamp down his own emotions, or to calculate how much he wanted to say, Damen could not have begun to guess.

"He died," Laurent said, "a few years ago." His voice had a different quality now than usual. Something hard, and yet hushed as well. As though it pained him to speak about it, and he hated that it did, and he wanted to hide that pain, and he knew it wasn't possible, all at once. Fighting a losing battle, and choosing to fight it anyway. Something jarred in Damen's chest, an uncomfortable feeling that came with its own edge of pain. 

"What happened?" he asked, unsure whether he should press but too invested not to ask.

"He was killed," Laurent said. He had won the battle with his voice after all, and this simple sentence came out hard and emotionless as his demands that Damen stay out of his way.

For some time, as they sped back through the city, there was silence. Outside the windows, even most of the signs had gone out by now. Damen forced himself to watch them anyway, because he knew that otherwise, his eyes would remain locked on Laurent, and he wanted to spare them both the vulnerability. 

They didn't speak all the rest of the way back to Laurent's loft, or in the elevator to the top floor where he lived. In Damen's head, scenes from the night played over and over again. Laurent's sudden interest in bringing him along, how he had known exactly where to go and what to do when he got there, how he had made sure that Damen saw the spreadsheet himself, made sure he'd understood what it meant. Told him why it mattered. There had to have been some reason.

They reached the loft and Laurent let them both inside. In the dark of the living room, lit only by the remaining lights from the city below, coming in through the wall of windows, Damen watched Laurent's shoulders fall into a casual, exhausted posture -- something he only realized, as he saw it, that he had never seen before. Everything clicked at last into place.

How Laurent had snapped, that first day, that he hadn't been the one to hire Damen. How he had wanted to make sure Damen saw everything tonight. And now this, allowing himself to relax in Damen's presence for the first time since his arrival weeks ago.

"You thought I was working for your uncle," Damen said into the darkness of the room.

Laurent, a few feet further inside, stopped walking and turned, slightly, to look at Damen. Damen wasn't sure how much he could see. Laurent was illuminated by the cool blue of the collective neon suffusing the living room from the windows. It caught in his hair, his eyes, and leant an unearthly glow to his fair skin. It remained too dark for Damen to see his expression, but he could feel Laurent's eyes on him, his attention. He didn't speak to confirm or deny Damen's statement, which was answer enough.

"What if I had been?" Damen asked. "What if I'd been working for him, and I sabotaged you tonight?"

Again, Laurent didn't answer. Damen thought he might not give any response at all, only the glimmer of his gaze in the dark had turned distinctly calculating, the way it did when he was going over his options privately. And then he reached behind himself, and produced a demure, hand-held gun from some private pocket in his clothing. The jacket, of course, the one he had added to his outfit before they'd left the apartment.

The sight of it, small and improbable in Laurent's hand, startled a laugh out of Damen's chest, softer than he would have chosen. In reaction against it, he allowed a not insignificant touch of arrogance to his voice when he said, "I don't work for anyone, sweetheart."

Across the room, Laurent's eyes flashed. "Except for me," he said.

"Of course," Damen replied, his tone intentionally mild.

Without another word, Laurent turned sharply and walked away, taking the little gun with him.

#

It had been three days since Laurent had satisfactorily proven to himself that Damen was not, at least, working in league with his uncle, and he was having a problem.

The plan had worked perfectly. He'd gotten two pieces of information out of the evening's work: one, that his uncle was, in fact, moving money to cover the expenses of his coveted youth center, and that he was using his cronies within the shareholders to do so legally (previously a suspicion, now a known fact, even if he couldn't prove it to anyone else -- yet); and two, that Damen was not working for his uncle and could be trusted not to sell Laurent out to him, if nothing else.

There was still some small chance that Damen was working for Uncle, after all, and had merely deemed it not worth the risk to get Laurent caught. Perhaps he had suspected that Laurent was carrying a gun, or he had felt it when Laurent landed on top of him during his stunt beneath the front desk. But no, he would have had ample opportunity to sabotage Laurent long before then, if that had been the case.

So it was possible. But between the fact that Laurent had made it out safely (something he almost certainly would not have done if Damen had been working for his uncle) and Damen's apparently genuine reaction of surprise when he'd put the pieces together for himself, it wasn't likely. Laurent could press on it and stress over it to the last, or he could accept the minimal risk and move forward from here with the knowledge that Damen had his own agenda, but that Laurent's uncle was most likely not a part of it. It was enough, for now.

In truth, the whole thing couldn't have gone better, if it hadn't been for that one mishap in the last moment. And it was that, naturally, that Laurent couldn't get out of his head.

The sudden fear that it was all about to turn on its head, turn against him. That, after convincing himself he had relatively little to fear from Damen, it was all going to fall apart anyway. And then the hard grip of Damen's hands on his shoulders, the fall, the long press of Damen's body against his own.

Ridiculous, to be so fixated on it. And yet, it had been three days, and Laurent could think of almost nothing else.

When he closed his eyes at night, body and mind pushed just to the brink of all-consuming exhaustion, there was Damen: crushed beneath Laurent's full weight and bearing it like it was nothing, the muscles of his arms, his chest, taut and overwhelming under Laurent's hands.

When he sat through meeting after meeting, even those he would normally have found interesting, and those that required his full attention, his mind soon wandered and he was faced with Damen again: those dark, warm eyes like open windows right to his mind as they trailed over Laurent's face, taking him in like he were a work of art in a museum.

What was worse, the knowledge that Damen wasn't working for Laurent's uncle after all seemed to break a barrier he hadn't been aware was a temporary structure. If he had only to navigate his own body's response to Damen's, it would have been one thing. He was accustomed enough to conquering himself, to mastering himself. He could have managed that.

But slipping in between the memories of their thirty seconds beneath the desk together were flashes of Damen around the apartment -- the openly pleased expression on his face when he told Laurent he'd loved the book he'd left out; the way he laughed at Laurent when he believed him to be too harsh or too hard; his generally good-natured approach to whatever Laurent threw at him. The way he'd looked that day when he'd come out of his bedroom dressed in nothing but a towel slung low around his hips.

Laurent forced himself to sit rigid and straight in his chair at the table where several people of low rank within DeVere Corp. were discussing how best to spend their minimal employee-appreciation budget for the month. Laurent had presented his own ideas earlier in the afternoon, and he knew that they would be adopted eventually, though he knew also that it would be best to let the others discuss it and come to that decision on their own.

He only wished they would discuss it faster.

He had plans for his evening, plans he had taken considerable risks to make, and he could feel himself growing increasingly impatient to begin them, even if he wouldn't allow anyone else to see it.

Damen had the night off, which Laurent had almost needed to force him to take. Not without reason. No doubt he believed Laurent would be undertaking some new, dangerous adventure and he wanted to be brought along again.

He had exacted this promise from Laurent the next morning, and Laurent had gone along with it because, if Damen truly wasn't working to Uncle's purposes, then he could at least be useful for Laurent's. They may have been on opposite sides in the larger war -- something they both knew, though Damen hadn't yet guessed that Laurent knew it too -- but they could be useful to each other in the initial battles.

But Laurent's plans, tonight -- for this one day, for just a few, scraped-out hours of his life -- had nothing to do with that. He didn't like it, but his problem was growing worse by the day, and something had to be done, or he would be useless in another seventy-two hours. Already he couldn't concentrate. Fortunately his ears worked for him, and his eyes, and he could go back and process information quickly when he needed to make a response or answer some tedious question in order to force the conversation forward. But his capacity would only diminish, until he did something to slake his body's thirst.

And so, Damen had been sent away. He would no doubt use the time to make contact with his people, but that was an inevitability. At least now Laurent knew when he was doing it, and what he was likely to say.

A win for him on all sides, then, if he looked at it from a certain angle.

Another hour passed before the meeting finally ended.

Finally -- finally -- his own proposals were adopted and the meeting was dismissed. Laurent had already cleared his schedule for the rest of the afternoon, having determined that it would be a better use of his time to get this taken care of now so that he could be back at his usual functioning capacity tomorrow. Damen should be long gone from the apartment by the time Laurent made it back. And he had already made the one stop he needed in order to facilitate his evening's plans. All he had to do was get home.

He did this in record time, speeding through the city and trusting that his expensive car and familiar plates would keep the police away from him, which they did. He opened the door onto his blessedly empty apartment, already deciding not to waste any time, just in case Damen came back early, something he seemed likely to do, if only because it was the opposite of what Laurent wanted from him.

Not that he could have waited much longer anyway.

He hurried across the apartment, not bothering to turn on any lights until he arrived in his own bedroom, where he shut and locked the door. On the bed, he dropped the discreet, brown paper bag he'd carried in from the car.

Then he stripped fastidiously out of his clothes, folding them and setting them on the chair in the corner to be picked up tomorrow for dry cleaning, even though he wanted nothing more than to drop them in a heap on the floor and rush to the bed at once. He would give in to his body's base cravings, but that did not mean he had to behave like an animal.

Feeling as though he had lost a fight and had to, grudgingly, hand over a prize, he bit his lip (there was no one here to see, he reminded himself, not even any mirrors in the room where he might catch his own reflection), and took up the bag, and slid beneath the sheets on the bed.

Suddenly wishing he'd stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water, he realized his throat was dry. He could feel his pulse beating there, his heart gone heavy in his chest, expanding out through his body. He felt vile and a little sick, but he pushed through it. The soft bed sheets were creamy on his skin, which had turned over-warm through hours, days (weeks) of anticipation. His body was at war with itself, desire like a cancer growing in the lining of his stomach.

He closed his eyes and breathed slowly in through his nose, out through his mouth, several times, until he felt his body begin to unclench. His shoulders unlocked, sinking one millimeter at a time.

Not every part of his body had gotten the memo to tense and revolt against his plans. Between his legs, he felt hot, hungry for something he nearly never wanted. Once, maybe twice in a couple of years, his body would demand attention from him, and even less often than that, he gave in to it. Never had he lost the battle as spectacularly as he had this time. He could blame Damen for that, and he would, happily.

At the thought of Damen, with his ridiculous arms and his stupid face, more of the tension leaked out of him, for which he was both grateful and annoyed. 

Laurent swallowed against his constricting throat, and for the moment left the paper bag where it sat by the pillows. Ignoring it, he instead allowed one hand to breach the covers he'd pulled over himself to the chin, dipping down below them to run in a proprietary downward stroke from chest to belly to hip. And then, finally, he wrapped his fingers lightly around his cock.

His breath stuttered, somewhere between his lungs and his throat, and for a long moment, all he could do was remain still as he forced his body to relax. One of many reasons he didn't attempt this often: it always took far more time than it was worth. But he had committed, and even as he struggled, other parts of him were clearly rejoicing. With gritted teeth, he sank into the thoughts that might just allow him to get through this.

He kept his imaginings abstract for the moment, so he could lie to himself about what they meant.

Gently, slowly, he tightened his hold on himself, imagining that his fingers were warmer, thicker, callused in places where Laurent's had no reason to be. It was easier, he admitted to himself, this way. Somehow it was easier both to be alone, and to imagine that he wasn't.

For a few minutes, he did only this: he concentrated on his breath, moving in his lungs; he stroked himself, so slowly, beneath the blankets; he coaxed himself to loosen, spreading his knees and allowing his shoulders to sink into the pillows behind him.

High on his cheeks, he felt a flush he normally worked hard to diminish. It had the delicious and illicit feeling of shame, and he squeezed his eyes more tightly shut against it even as his cock further hardened in his hand. The feeling of it, of being touched in such a way after so many months of only the most perfunctory contact, was raw and overwhelming, but he continued on, keeping his fingers not loose, but not tight either, brushing gently up over the head, and then stroking down again. No need to rush. He had given himself the entire evening for this express purpose.

Unbidden, he wondered what Damen would be like, if he were here. If he were to come back to the apartment early, if he went looking for Laurent, if Laurent had forgotten to lock the door.

He could picture Damen standing there, in the doorway, watching his body move subtly under the sheets. Laurent didn't know how Damen would feel, what he would think.

Maybe he would laugh at Laurent, as he sometimes did, amused by the pathetic way Laurent had gone pink, how he couldn't stop touching himself even though he'd been interrupted. Maybe he would stride boldly into the room -- he certainly had the audacity -- and join Laurent on the bed. Rip the blankets away, leaving Laurent exposed and hard before him. Leaving him choking on his own humiliation --

No. Laurent hadn't come this far to dissolve into panicked recollections. He let go of himself and buried his hands instead into the sheets, breathing through the moment and allowing it to pass, turning his mind to nothingness, to sunlight on the surface of a lake, to a cloudless blue sky.

For several seconds, he did nothing but breathe, and when he came out on the other side of those seconds, he found himself still hard and ready to go on.

Tentatively, he conjured again the Damen in his mind, out of curiosity and a need for some channel, something to hold the feeling racing through him. He imagined Damen taking hold of him, grip hard and firm almost to the point of being too much, and Laurent changed his own grip to match. Maybe Damen would use one hand to stroke him, and the other to hold him down, his fingers splayed over Laurent's chest. Laurent would move under him, try to sit up, to move away, and it would be useless -- he would know, they both would -- to struggle against Damen's absurd strength. Something warm and molten pooled inside him at the thought.

Maybe Damen would laugh then, openly, to see Laurent so completely in his power. Laurent felt sick with it, but he couldn't deny his body's reaction to the idea. Trapped in his own bed, his own home, pinned to the mattress by Damen's superior strength, those hot liquid eyes fixed on him, creased at the corners with mirth to see Laurent laid so low.

As he thought this, though, as he imagined it, the picture of Damen began to blur. Something about the scenario didn't ring quite true, and a deeper part of Laurent had realized it before his consciousness fully caught up. Before the picture could change, morph into something that would derail all of Laurent's plans, something new occurred to him, something he hadn't thought to consider before, and he latched onto it before he had the chance to overthink: that maybe -- maybe Damen would be gentle.

Maybe he would be aware of his own strength, but he would pour his effort into curbing it, using it only to coax Laurent to come along with him. Not to force him, but to encourage.

Maybe his touches would be light. Sure and confident with the possession of experience, but patient -- as he had been the night they'd broken into Guion's office -- and willing to take things at Laurent's pace, as he had been with the books Laurent left for him. Watching Laurent with all of the humor, even appreciation, he had shown in those few moments when Laurent had allowed him close enough to show it. Playing Laurent's game before he'd even realized what the game was. 

Laurent came back to himself when he heard a small gasp escape his own throat. Blindly, he groped overhead for the paper bag he had bought earlier that day. With his free hand, he dumped the contents onto the bed beside him. They landed with a dull thud, and in a moment, he had the heavy metal plug in his hand. It wasn't particularly large, but it had a satisfying heft to it.

He felt his blood running through him, hot and insistent, at the feel of it in his hand. Though he spent far more of his life disinterested in such things than most people did, it would be difficult to prove the point now. His cock strained, and he almost thought he should hold it tightly, to keep from spilling too soon, but he calmed down after a still moment.

The plug felt cold against his palm, but the thought of waiting for it no longer seemed tenable. He wanted it, now, and he saw no reason he should have to wait. He parted his lips and slipped it past them, warming it on his tongue.

His chest was practically heaving by now, and while it was mostly from some innate sense of urgency, there was panic there too, lurking beneath the surface. Laurent shut his eyes against it and conjured again the image of Damen beside him, watching him hold the plug in his mouth, his gaze heavy on Laurent's wet lips as his hand was heavy on Laurent's lower belly, rubbing him there in small, soothing strokes. A sound almost rose up out of him, and before he could remember that he was alone, that he had cleared his schedule and his apartment, he clamped his teeth down on it, trapping it inside him.

He'd had enough of waiting, and the plug had grown warm and slick in his mouth. He removed it, and quickly grabbed the small bottle of lube that made up the rest of his purchase from earlier in the day. Quickly, efficiently, he squeezed a bit of it onto his fingers and swiped them over his hole, not bothering to take his time with it.

Finally, he pressed the plug against the muscle there. Before he could get it inside, however, the riot in his body began anew. Everything from his navel to his knees positively pulsed with need, and he physically twisted in the sheets as his hips moved one way and his shoulders the other, half of him dying to take the plug inside, the other half dying to get away. His breath had gone harsh and ragged and his teeth were once again ground against each other, holding his jaw shut tight. Slowly, he battened himself down, regaining control of one piece of his body at a time, until he once more lay flat against the mattress.

He could practically hear Damen in his head now. Not the brash, cruel version of him from earlier, but the sweet, soft one. Shushing him, comforting him, whispering that he could do this, and that it would be worth it when he did.

He shook his head. He didn't want to imagine what Damen might say; he didn't want to risk poking holes in the illusion.

But the imagined words had served their purpose nonetheless. Once more, he had relaxed his body down to the point of grudging malleability, and this time when he pressed the plug against himself, there was some give.

As he drew in a deep breath, he pressed a little harder, and his body yielded. The breath left him in one long, shuddering sigh. There was the final stretch, flavored with just an edge of pain -- somehow both terrifying and exhilarating every time -- and then the plug was inside. Heavy, satisfying, impossible to ignore. Thrilling and present and enveloping every sense, taking him over.

He took a long moment just to settle. To bring his breathing back to a normal rhythm, to allow his body to adjust. The war, too, had calmed somewhat. More of his body was on the same page, embracing the intrusion now that it was done, now that pleasure had settled over him. He shivered as it spread from that place deep in him and out to his hips, down his thighs, up through the base of his spine and the back of his neck and into his head, finally turning his mind to foggy numbness. 

If he could remain still, he might stay here forever. Just enough awareness of his body, just enough focus, to suspend himself in this place of dizzying, pleasant static indefinitely. Why move at all? Nothing mattered here. And it felt so good to believe that, even for an instant: that nothing mattered.

Only he couldn't hold himself still. Already he had to struggle to keep his hips from moving, to keep from grinding his ass against the mattress, seeking friction, seeking the explosion of sensation his body remembered in a way that his mind never did. In the end, he lost that fight too, and his hips moved on their own accord, pressing back into the mattress with one fluid motion, changing the angle of the heavy plug so that sparks danced behind his eyes and heat flashed through him like lightning.

His mouth fell open, which he felt in a distant sort of way, and he knew it was watering, wishing for something to latch onto -- a corner of pillow or the meat of a hand, the bone of a wrist.

He would lose himself entirely if he stayed like this. If he lay there with his back to the bed and the plug not just inside him, but moving in him as he ground against the mattress. It might take hours to come, and he didn't know what would happen to him in that time, or where he would go.

Already he felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and the Damen of his imagination was lost to him. All power of thought was slipping away. If he didn't make a decision now, he would be trapped here, locked to the bed, locked in his body, unable to tear himself from the pattern of movement, beholden to it until it overcame him or he grew too exhausted to go on.

With a fearsome effort, he flipped himself onto his front, lifting his hips up just enough to fit a hand underneath them. For the first time in some minutes, he wrapped his fingers once more around himself. Now when his hips moved, rocking back and forth, the plug only shifted subtly, and he fucked into his hand, slick with sweat and the remnants of the lube he'd used.

In incoherent flashes, he imagined someone behind him -- a faceless shadow, a grotesque memory, Damen,  _ Damen _ \-- hands strong and unforgiving on his hips, his cock, his throat. For a second, he saw himself as someone else might see him, thrusting back against nothing, against empty air, sweat-drenched and desperate and wanting it, wanting to be filled and fucked so badly that he was crying, literally crying into his pillows like, like a --

He felt the moment when it would have happened. Felt the way that invisible, unreachable place somewhere deep, deep inside his mind was almost,  _ almost _ , breached. And then he felt his own iron-willed control, wrested from his grasp in a show of bone-deep instinct, grab it by the throat and force it bodily back from the edge, pulling him back into himself at the last moment, before he could catch for himself any sense of relief, every muscle clenching down hard, lighting him up with pain as they all worked to hold him back, to hold him down, from his toes to his head.

It was over then, and he knew he'd been foolish to try.

He allowed himself a minute, maybe two, to bury a few frustrated tears into the pile of pillows. And then he gathered himself, cleaned himself up, dressed once more, put the plug and the lube back in their bag, and left the apartment to find a dumpster, somewhere nearby but anonymous, where he could get rid of them for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and kudos are always well-loved and appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damen and Laurent make a nighttime trip to an illegal fighting ring.

"And then you fight him," Laurent said, for the third time that hour.

Despite everything -- the frustration of the circles Laurent was running around him in this conversation, the fact that he still didn't know why, exactly, Laurent was sticking on this so stubbornly -- Damen couldn't help laughing. 

Laurent's expression was serious, but Damen thought he saw some amusement lurking in the shadows of his eyes anyway.

It had been a week since they had broken into the DeVere offices and seen the proof that money was being moved around to cover the expenses of the new youth center, a week since Damen had proven to Laurent that he wasn't in league with his uncle, and a week since he had told Laurent if bringing down DeVere was what he was after, then Damen wanted to help. A week since Laurent had agreed.

In that time, Laurent had been up to something on his own, for which he had told Damen to take a night off. Damen hadn't argued because it presented a good opportunity to check in with Nik and Akielos. Nik still didn't like the plan, even after weeks (or maybe especially after weeks) into it, and even less once he heard how things had changed. And even less than that once he heard Damen talk about Laurent.

"Oh no," he had said. "No, no, no -- I know that look, and I know that voice. You're into him!" Not a question, and not entertained by the idea either. It came out mostly as an accusation, and a dumbfounded one at that. "How, Damen? How are you going to explain this to me, man?"

"I don't really need to explain anything to you," Damen had pointed out, though even he could hear that there was no real reproach in his voice. He'd shrugged. "It's not a big deal. He couldn't have any less interest. Nothing's going to happen."

Nik had only crossed his arms and scowled through the rest of Damen's report on how things were going, how he hadn't been able to find anything in Laurent's place, how he had been beginning to think the whole thing was useless when Laurent had brought him in on a mission-slash-test of his own. And how they had agreed, afterward, to work together.

"I'm a professional, Nik," Damen ended the meeting by reminding him. "I've got this."

A few days later, sitting across the kitchen island in Laurent's loft, Damen was beginning to seriously question his own assessment of how much he did, in fact, have this. Laurent was again wearing the thick, black-rimmed glasses he wore to read the morning newspaper, only now he was looking over them, down his nose, at Damen, appearing for all the world like a teacher, first day on the job with a class of unruly kindergartners.

"I'm serious, Damen," he said now. "If this plan is going to work, I need you to do this."

The words sobered Damen somewhat. He realized he was used to being able to talk himself out of doing anything he truly didn't want to do. But he didn't know anyone who could talk himself out of anything once Laurent had put his mind to talking them into it. 

The problem was that it was a good plan. And functionally, it required about the same from each of them. In fact, Laurent was probably taking on more of the risk than Damen was, even before they factored in that getting caught would surely mean losing any chance of inheriting DeVere Corp. when he came of age, as he was meant to. 

And it was true that they needed more than they had, if they were going to have any real chance of bringing DeVere down. They knew what he was up to, but the only other people who did were those who were in on it, and no doubt he had promised them plenty to keep them in his own pocket.

It didn't help that Laurent's uncle had spent years doing everything he could to make it appear that Laurent himself wasn't the least interested in the company, or his father's legacy, or even in honoring his brother's memory.

It wasn't that he'd avoided the attention, as Damen had always assumed (as everyone had always assumed, which was exactly what DeVere wanted). It was that his uncle did everything in his considerable power to make sure Laurent was kept far from any real position, any real money, and any real attention. Seeing what Laurent could do with the limited resources he had, Damen figured it was no small wonder. Laurent had hidden depths that Damen, after weeks of close living, was only just beginning to plumb.

And this time, Laurent's genius had led them to a plan that would be invaluable, if it worked. They needed proof, and barring that, they needed witnesses. Laurent believed he could procure a bit of both, all in the course of a single night, which sounded great on paper. The problem was that it required Damen to do something he had sworn he would never do again.

"Damen," Laurent said again. He took off his glasses and set them down on the granite top of the island between them. No doubt he had spent the last several seconds carefully watching Damen's face as it shifted from amused laughter to the shadows of old sorrow. "I can't imagine your reticence comes from any fear that you might lose," he said, with a sardonic tilt of one eyebrow.

Laurent didn't need to ask him to explain. The pause was heavy with expectation. Damen drew in a long breath, preparing himself to think about something he did his best, in general, not to consider at all.

"I don't fight anymore," he finally said. "Not because I'm afraid I'll lose," he agreed, hoping that the meaningful tone of his voice would be enough to put Laurent off, though perhaps he should have known better.

Laurent merely watched him with those bright, bright eyes, and waited for him to go on.

"A few years ago," Damen said, "I used to go to the fights all the time. It was sort of how I made my way for a while." In fact, it was how he'd kept himself fed and sheltered for years, and how he had come to be involved with Akielos, until he could work his way up through the ranks. "But there was an accident," he said.

"You were hurt?"

Damen shook his head. "Not me." Under normal circumstances, Damen would never have told Laurent this story.

But he felt, guiltily, as though Laurent had already bared himself, placed his own vulnerabilities on the table: his pain over his brother's untimely death, the fact that he had his own uncle for an enemy. If that had been his ante, in order to get into the game alongside Damen, then what could Damen do but match him, if he were to engage in good faith?

"There's always a certain amount of risk when you get in the ring," he said. "Anyone who goes in knows that, especially in the kind of place I used to fight in. No gloves, no padding. I fought most days, like it was a job, at different places around the city. Underground clubs, that sort of thing. Then one night they paired me up with this new kid. He was smaller than me, but most people were, and they said he'd come in with training."

In general, Damen knew his own strength. He could get carried away sometimes, get swept up in the physicality of a moment and lose himself. But for the most part, he knew how to stay rooted in reality and keep himself firmly on the ground. Still, all the preparation in the world, all the training and practice, couldn't mitigate every possible risk, and those wild cards, those possibilities for real violence and real damage, could come out of nowhere and change anything at any moment.

In the kitchen of Laurent's loft, Damen had stopped looking at the man in front of him, to stare instead into the granite galaxy of the counter top. Now, however, he looked up to meet Laurent's eyes. If he was going to be honest, he was going to do it properly, without shying away from the truth.

"He was a good fighter, the kid. I never even knew his real name. The round went long, and these things are always held late at night. We were both getting tired. I hit him and he went down hard. I knew I'd won, and for a minute I was happy. Everyone in the room was cheering. There's always chaos around these things. And winning meant having enough to eat for a week. But then the kid wasn't getting up. There wasn't any blood, so I thought he must be fine. Only I couldn't get him to move, and then the medic came and took him away. I never found out who he was, but he didn't come back, and after asking around for a few weeks, I found out that he died in the hospital where they'd dropped him off. Dumped him on the front steps and left him there."

Damen's throat closed up painfully over any other words he might have said, but that was the whole story, as far as he knew it.

Across the island, Laurent's eyes had gone wide and openly horrified, in perhaps the most dramatic show of emotion that Damen had ever seen from him. For a long time, he didn't say anything, and Damen knew he must be shocked, maybe disgusted.

It had been an accident, of course. Damen had never meant to seriously hurt the kid, or anyone else he'd ever come across in the ring. It was merely chance that he had landed in just the wrong way, to hit his brilliantly golden head on the cement floor just so, at the right angle and with the right pressure that meant he would never get up again. 

And Damen had needed the money from the fight, there was no arguing against that. At the time, it was all he knew how to do. It was through that fight, in fact, that Akielos had first reached out to him, recruited him. They'd seen his potential, and it was their help that had allowed him to get out of fighting in the first place. He hadn't been in the ring since, and he didn't relish the idea of going back now.

Even as he looked like he might vomit right there in the kitchen, Laurent's face was already shuttering, already hardening to his purpose, so that Damen knew the words he was about to say a full three seconds before he said them.

When he did speak, his voice had gone hard and angry as Damen hadn't heard it since his earliest days in the loft, before they'd broken into Giuon's office together.

"If you don't fight, the plan won't work," Laurent said. And left it at that. He stood from the island, leaving behind his glasses, and marched stiffly out of the room. He disappeared into the hall, and a moment later, Damen heard the door to his bedroom slam shut.

Damen made himself breathe through the pain in his chest, think through the ache in his head. He hated the thought of getting back in the ring, but Laurent was right.

DeVere planned to announce the opening of his new youth center -- Damen felt sick just thinking the words -- in two weeks. He was to hold a gala for the official announcement. It would not be their only chance to stop it, but it was their best chance. Before anyone else got too involved, before the project made it too far off the ground. They would never have a better opportunity to strike, not just against the project, but against the man himself.

Of course, if they succeeded, Laurent stood to gain more than just the destruction of his uncle's pet project. It would be a move that would hobble DeVere, and leave Laurent free to claim his inheritance in a few months' time without resistance. At least, without resistance from within.

The fact was, Damen hadn't been sent here to bring down DeVere, or even Laurent. He had been sent to find a way to bring down the whole corporation. Succeeding in this would be, to Akielos, a good first step. They would expect him to stay on with Laurent then, to use his favorable position -- now solidified by bringing down Laurent's uncle, his primary enemy and the sole resistance to him getting what was his -- to manipulate and ultimately take Laurent down as well, to tear the whole corporation down around him. It was what he had come here to do.

And, he reminded himself forcefully, it was a mission he believed in. DeVere Corp., apart from the nature of any mega-corporation, had been at the center of all of the major societal travesties of the last century. Again and again they had been exposed for exploiting their employees, buying up and then destroying natural resources, corrupting the political system from within, so that they could get away with anything -- even as the accusations against them grew more extreme and more horrible over the past years -- with little more than a slap on the wrist. A donation, nothing more than a pittance to a company so large, to a charity here and there, or some mid-level executive taking a forced retirement to show that they were turning over a new leaf, as though anyone would ever truly make them atone for their sins.

The massive class stratification outside the windows of Laurent's glittering tower was at least one-third the fault of Laurent's family's actions. They had spent years buying up any company that could have been considered their competition, only to underpay their employees and cut fifty-percent of jobs in the city in a single generation.

And Damen knew that whatever new trust, or even softness, had grown up between himself and Laurent, he couldn't deny these things any more than he could deny that he didn't believe in them, that he found them abhorrent. He knew an entity like DeVere Corp. had to be dismantled -- from within, if that was what it took -- no matter who sat at its head.

But things were more complicated than he'd expected when he arrived here, when he'd insisted that he handle this job himself. He'd known it would be a long game, to slink into the center of DeVere Corp.'s inner workings, to sabotage it from the inside. What he hadn't counted on was that Laurent would be a real person. That he would have his own problems, that he would be fighting his own battles.

His stomach twisted uncomfortably with guilt at the thought that Laurent trusted him -- after weeks of holding back from it, of keeping Damen at arm's length. Laurent trusted him enough to let him see even one small part of the battle he was fighting. Trusted him enough to ask for help.

And Damen would help him. He would have to. Because Laurent was right: this was their best chance at stopping his uncle, and stopping DeVere was Damen's best chance of setting himself up to do more in the future. The near future, if Laurent's inheritance remained unobstructed.

So he would do it. He would fight in the ring, even though he had sworn never to do so again. He would feel the heat of the spotlights on his bare back, and he would perform for people who only cared to see blood, no matter who it came from -- mostly those who had the money to bet, people from up here, in Laurent's world of skyrises and fine suits, who only shucked their expensive clothes and left behind their expensive cars to visit the dredged remains of the city they had taken and used and discarded.

He would fight, and he would win, and Laurent would get what he needed: proof, to bring down his uncle. And Damen would get what he needed: Laurent's trust.

Laurent had never returned from his bedroom, preferring to leave Damen alone in the much larger space of the apartment than to be in the same room with him, no doubt. Damen stood and went to one of the windows that made up an entire wall of the loft. He looked down to the streets below, so distant from this height that he could almost imagine them the blue-gray of brooks and tributaries rather than paved city streets.

There were two separate worlds that existed at once in this city, and he and Laurent had come from each of them. Damen had grown up down below. His people were still there. And no matter how much time he spent in Laurent's shining castle, he would never belong here. He couldn't allow himself to forget that.

At his side, he flexed his fists. It had been years since he'd fought in anything other than self-defense or a mission for Akielos. He wondered what it would be like to once more feel the blood on his hands, the heady way his body took over in the ring, leaving him thoughtless, mindless but for the calculation of which move to make next, and what his opponent might do. He hoped Laurent understood what he was asking. He hoped Laurent was prepared to face it down.

#

Two days later, Laurent appeared out of his bedroom dressed as Damen had never seen him before.

They hadn't spoken since that day in the kitchen. Damen had turned over and over in his head everything that he'd said. He'd assumed, at first, that Laurent was merely angry with him for resisting the idea of fighting. But after he'd made up his mind, Damen had gone to Laurent's door, knocked gently, and when Laurent didn't come out, he'd simply stated to the door that he would fight for the sake of the plan, the only one they had. Still, Laurent hadn't emerged, or spoken a word to Damen.

So Damen had played over their conversation, and he began to realize that Laurent's mood had turned not when Damen said he didn't want to fight, but when he'd told the story of the reason why.

Laurent wasn't angry with him for not wanting to fight -- he was upset about the kid who had died. Well, Damen could hardly blame him for that. Guilt over the kid, nameless as he was to Damen, ate at him every day. But it did seem a touch hypocritical that Laurent DeVere, heir to a corporation that had cost thousands their lives, would hold this particular grudge against him. 

When he stepped out into the loft on the day they were meant to descend into the lower city, however, Laurent seemed to have set his feelings on the matter aside. Whether he had found it in himself to forgive Damen for what had happened, Damen didn't know. But he had at least decided that this was too important to allow his own feelings to get in the way.

Everything about his appearance had been carefully cultivated. His face was arranged in sleek, grim determination. His look dared anyone to underestimate him, and promised that they would regret it once they did.

From across the room, his eyes were cold and hard as he regarded Damen. He didn't look any less finely-made for the dressed-down clothing he wore. In fact, it sent a surprised starburst of warmth through Damen to look at him wearing such different clothes: a pair of dark, tailored jeans that sat snug and suggestive in all the right places, a plain white t-shirt in perfect condition, and the leather jacket, resting primly around his shoulders, that Damen had found in the bottom of his wardrobe the first time he'd gone snooping around the apartment.

"I see you've dressed the part," Laurent said.

Damen was pretty sure it took him a full minute to process Laurent's words. He didn't feel as though he looked any different than normal. But of course, Laurent had never seen him in his normal. He had been looking at Damen in trousers and fastidious button-downs every day for a month. He'd never seen Damen wearing what he wore now, what he had been far more accustomed to before he'd arrived here as Laurent's "personal assistant."

For his part, Damen had also dressed simply. A pair of old, worn-out jeans, a black t-shirt that hugged his shoulders and arms. He would need to change again before he got into the ring, but that was easy enough to do. Dress requirements were minimal.

He realized two things about his own appearance at once. The first was that, while he was still dressed decently enough for any normal company, he was showing much more of his sun-darkened skin than Laurent had seen on any occasion except the day he'd come out in nothing but a towel. Bare arms, open v-neck collar, a patch over his knee where the old jeans had a tear. The second was that Laurent was staring, which only took him so long to notice because he himself had been staring at Laurent. Funny, since despite the change in clothes, Laurent was as covered as he always had been.

Damen felt his face move into a self-satisfied grin, which Laurent met with something unfamiliar and enticing -- he wasn’t bothered that Damen had noticed, or that it had pleased him.

They were both quiet as they made their way quickly down to the parking garage, as much out of a desire not to be spotted and stopped as anything else. Now that Laurent knew Damen wasn't reporting back to his uncle, he had been a little freer -- not a lot, but a little -- with information about his situation.

The entire building, not everyone in it but many of them, was full of people working for DeVere. Some were just residents of the building, not even officially on DeVere Corp.'s payroll, just taking a little money on the side from DeVere to report to him any of Laurent's movements that they happened to catch wind of. Any visitors he had, that sort of thing.

Everyone inside who worked for Laurent really worked for DeVere, if Laurent was to be believed. Staff of the company, those who did Laurent's errands, everyone.

At first, Damen tended to think Laurent was being a bit paranoid. But after enough time around the building spent paying attention not just to Laurent, but to all of those around him, Damen began to see the signs. How nearly none of the people who came into contact with him ever showed him the least niceties -- they were polite, but never kind -- and some of them even mentioned outright that they had spoken with his uncle recently, or that they would again soon. There wasn't anything subtle or hidden about it.

DeVere wanted Laurent to know he had eyes on him at all times.

No wonder Laurent had been so leery of Damen. And, Damen understood but couldn't explain, he was right to: if Akielos hadn't decided to jump on the opportunity to snag this position so close to DeVere Corp.'s heir, no doubt DeVere would have slipped a man of his own into the position. It had, no doubt, been his plan when he'd set the position in the first place. To have someone able to keep an eye on Laurent every moment of every day.

"I'm sure you upset his plans horribly," Laurent had said one morning over coffee in the kitchen -- something they had taken to having together -- "when you decided to apply."

He watched Damen closely as he said this, startling Damen into a panicked moment where he wondered if Laurent knew more than he had let on, somehow. Laurent was, among many things, fiercely intelligent; he had to be, in order to stay even one step behind his uncle when he was surrounded on all sides by enemies.

Damen had met Laurent's eyes then, as though he could find in them some glimmer of the truth. But Laurent had merely gone back to reading his morning paper without saying another word, and Damen had chalked it up to one of Laurent's cryptic allusions, which seemed to be a part of his usual speech.

In the car on the way to the lower city, even now that they were alone, they still didn't speak. Damen could feel two ghosts haunting them as Laurent drove them through the nighttime streets: that of Laurent’s brother, who had owned the beautiful car before him, who had looked out for him, no doubt, in the treacherous world they occupied, and who had died; and that of the boy Damen had, however unintentionally, destroyed with his own hands in the ring. Whatever, humorous or anticipatory air had hung around them in the apartment was long gone now.

Damen almost wished he did feel excited to be back in the ring. And in a way, he supposed he did. He'd always loved to fight, as long as it was relatively fair. Always loved the challenge of a strong opponent, who knew what he was doing, how to use his body to full advantage, as Damen did. And Laurent had assured him that the man he was to fight tonight would be a good match, though he had scoffed at Damen's idea of a fair fight.

Damen had thought at first that Laurent meant for him to cheat somehow, but he had clarified: there was no such thing as fair in a fight. Then he had cast a coolly appraising look over Damen's body and added, "You won't need to cheat."

Somehow, that hadn't made Damen feel much better about the whole thing.

#

They arrived at the ring -- or the dirty basement where the ring had been drawn, crudely, onto the cement floor -- just after midnight, and already, the room was packed with shouting, sweating bodies.

Laurent had been to such an event only once, to see what it was like, against the wishes of everyone around him. At least, it would have been against their wishes, if they had known about it. He had long been adept at sneaking out of his own apartments. But the particular flavor of grime and violence at the ring didn't especially appeal to him. He preferred his deviancy to come in cleaner, shinier packaging.

He was glad for the experience now though, minimal as it was. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to turn and run out again. The smell of dirt, sweat, and spilled alcohol mingled in the room, hovering over the mass of bodies like a thick fog. It was overwhelming, hard to think through. Fortunately, not much thinking had to be done.

Damen seemed to have a natural sense for where they needed to go. Somewhere in the crowd, there would be a sort of master of ceremonies, someone in charge of signing and pairing up fighters. And taking illegal bets. Not that anything here was legal, but Laurent knew the cops in this city cared far less about people (poor people, he corrected himself) beating themselves and each other bloody on the concrete than they did about money changing hands outside the proper channels.

Damen brought them right up to the MC. As soon as the man caught sight of Damen, a wide grin spread over his face and the two greeted each other as old friends.

"Damen!" he shouted over the chaos of the room. "Are you here to fight?" he asked, sounding delighted. Damen reached out to shake his hand in greeting, and the man pulled Damen bodily forward into a quick, though deep, hug. Damen laughed, a strange sound to Laurent's ears, but bright and full of a joy that had been missing from him over the past hours.

"I am," Damen agreed, without the same degree of jubilance, but with a fair shake at excitement at least.

"Fantastic," the man said, his hand hard on Damen's shoulder. "I have just the man to pair you with."

Damen shot a look back over his shoulder at Laurent, a tiny spark of anxiety. Laurent stepped forward to pull out the wad of cash he'd brought, but as luck would have it, the MC's choice for Damen was exactly who they had come here to have him fight. Probably, Laurent reasoned, because there was no one else who would even stand a chance against Damen.

Though Damen seemed like he would have been happy to continue speaking with the MC, the man had a job to do. After a moment, he excused himself, leaving Laurent and Damen once more alone together in the throng of people packed into the large basement room.

Such diversions were common in the lower city, though the crowd was not made up entirely of the lower city's denizens. In fact, Laurent recognized more than a few faces himself. He doubted whether anyone would similarly recognize him, dressed as he was and out of his usual context. But if they did, well, Uncle had gone to such lengths to paint a picture of Laurent as a careless, brutal, and ignorant youth -- it would be easy enough to play off his presence here as just another disappointing aspect of his personality.

"Where's this man of yours?" Damen asked, leaning close to Laurent so he could be heard over the noise. Everywhere people were shouting for the fights to begin, for the MC to take their bets, at each other to be heard over the noise of everyone else.

"He isn't mine," Laurent said. "And there." He pointed across the room, to the other side of the ring, where Govart stood hulking over all of those around him. Unsurprisingly, he appeared to be alone. He was a big man, though not, perhaps, as big as Damen. Taller, but less broad in the shoulders. Still, muscle roped his shoulders, his arms, down his legs. He looked more at home here than anywhere Laurent had ever seen him before.

"He was my uncle's bodyguard," he told Damen now. Laurent's flesh crawled just looking at him, but this he kept to himself. The man would be no use to him dead, and somehow that was what Laurent suspected he would be if Damen learned of Laurent’s loathing, and the reason behind it. Privately, he was looking forward to seeing Damen obliterate him. But he needed Govart functional afterward. Unfortunately.

Govart had not yet noticed Laurent, though he doubted whether this would last much longer. He hoped Damen and Govart were set to fight early in the night, and regretted not paying the MC to make it happen when he had the chance. 

Of course that wasn't how it worked out at all. After just a few more minutes, spent mostly trying to find a place in the room that would suit both Damen's size and Laurent's interests, the MC pushed everyone back from the makeshift "ring," which was really just a painted square in the center of the floor. He announced that the fighting was to begin, and with relatively little ceremony, named the first two fighters.

Laurent and Damen had found a place to stand tucked together into a back corner. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, as the room was packed with excited people and they still needed to be able to see what went on in the ring. Fortunately, it was relatively easy to swing his focus away from Damen when he felt so strongly that he should keep his eyes on Govart, now on the other side of the room, and yet still easy to pick out of the crowd.

The first fight was over quickly. Two men, much smaller than Damen -- smaller even than Laurent -- though well-muscled, grappled briefly at the center of the ring. Laurent didn't know much about the sport, and couldn't say exactly what either one of them was doing, though he noticed that Damen's attention was rapt, and every once in a while he shook his head a little, to himself, as though noticing some mistake one or the other of them had made, even though it all just looked like a lot of writhing flesh from Laurent's perspective.

He glanced at the ring from time to time himself, but for the most part, he watched Govart. Everything about the man seemed to shout of some obscenity, even from clear across the basement room.

Govart could be crafty, in his way, and cunning. But he was overconfident, and he shared Laurent's uncle's penchant for underestimating those who stood against him.

Laurent relayed all of this to Damen in a low voice so he wouldn't be overheard in the din of the room. Damen appeared to remaine focused on the match, but every once in a while, his eyes flicked to Govart, keeping him in sight, calculating, taking the information Laurent gave him about his opponent and cataloging the facts for later use. It put Laurent somewhat at ease to watch this process occurring in Damen's face, guileless as ever.

The next fight, too, was finished in short order. The MC seemed at first to have arranged the fights in order of size, as though moving from the smallest fighters to the largest, but somewhere around the third or fourth match, Laurent realized that wasn't true at all. They had been ordered by skill. Those newer and less experienced made up the earlier part of the show, whereas those the MC had seen before and knew to expect a strong show from, he saved for later on. The result was that the tension heightened with every new match.

Before long, the painted ring was splattered here and there with violent sprays of blood, bright beneath the overhead lights which cast a fluorescent glow over the ring and diffused out over the rest of the room.

Laurent found the overwhelming scent of sweat and blood more than a little nauseating, but at the same time, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement of the show. And for those around the ring who had come down from the upper city for this, as he had, he could understand why the chaos, the physicality, the sheer brutality of the event held some appeal. In the world they occupied, displays of dominance were subtle, rather than spectacular as they were made here. He supposed that to a certain subset, that would be entertaining, even thrilling, to witness.

But it was not only the upper crust of the city who made up the audience. Everyone in the room had their own reasons for being there. Some were clearly enjoying the sport of it, as Uncle's cronies enjoyed watching golf on TV. Others seemed to want to be involved in the good-spirited ruckus. But a sharp eye cast over the room showed those who made their living this way, either by fighting and betting on themselves, collecting rewards, or accepting patrons -- or by managing the betting themselves.

It seemed that the officially illegal bets taken by the MC were not the only ones being made throughout the space. The MC must have known about it, and allowed it to go on. It wasn't exactly subtle, as tickets and slips of paper changed hands, and notebooks were removed and replaced from pockets.

Laurent became aware, all at once, that Damen was watching him. He turned to face him.

"Do you ever stop thinking?" Damen asked. He shot a pointed look at the two men currently sparring in the center of the room, whether to imply that there were more exciting things going on, or that he would have expected Laurent to find this titillating for some other reason.

"No," he said simply, because it was true, and because he wanted to see how Damen would respond to it.

Damen laughed, but it was a gentle laugh. Amused, maybe even fond, rather than exasperated or annoyed.

"The house is not the only party taking bets," Laurent pointed out, leaning in close to Damen so he could be heard without raising his voice too much. If Damen suspected him of other motives, he relegated it to a quiet grin and otherwise indulged him, leaning in. "Why do they allow it?"

"There's too much business for one man to manage alone," Damen said, matching Laurent's low timbre. The sound of his voice, so close to Laurent's ear, sent a wave of something rich and warm rolling through him, but he suppressed it. "And the cops are more willing to overlook the whole thing if no one comes out of it making too much."

Laurent nodded. He supposed it made sense, too, to have different calibers of bets placed with those who could better afford it. No doubt the house took only a certain quality, but wouldn't risk losing too much and being unable to pay out. In this way, it would be easy enough for those with less money to come and enjoy the games, without being left out of the gambling. And those more like Laurent, who came from the towers at the top of the city, could place bets more fitting to their own social class. Where was the fun, after all, in risking money you could afford to lose?

Damen was clearly amused by Laurent's reaction, which he supposed was prudish in a way. "You won't bet on me?" Damen said, joking -- or at least Laurent assumed he was mostly joking.

"That isn't why we're here," Laurent reminded him. "Though in a way, I'm betting more on you than anyone else in this room will be."

This seemed to sober Damen somewhat, and he turned back to the ring to watch.

Laurent found himself distracted. It was hard to pay attention to the fighting when he had to spend more energy than he liked maintaining a calm demeanor. Being in the same room with Govart, even a large room, and even one filled to bursting with other people, left him unsettled and queasy in a way he would have preferred to stamp beneath his boot.

Meanwhile, Damen next to him did seem to be growing anticipatory as the night wore on and his name still wasn't called. Laurent supposed that after weeks cooped up in the apartment, he was probably itching to use his body, even if it was in a tasteless display for a crowd of shouting, sweaty animals.

Finally, the MC made a show of announcing the final fight of the night. Close as they were beside each other, Laurent felt it as Damen tensed. Not, he thought, out of any degree of fear or nerves or anxiety. Rather, Damen seemed almost to vibrate with an excitement he may not even have realized he was putting off.

His face was focused, intense, as he watched the MC, the ring itself (now empty but for a few splatters of blood on the concrete), and Govart, still standing on the other side. By some lucky chance, he had not yet spotted Laurent in the dim light and shadows.

The MC had no microphone. Rather he yelled into the crowd, and when it became important to hear what he said, the throng hushed just enough that his projected voice carried well enough through the basement.

He announced Govart first, and the crowd shared a visceral reaction. Surely everyone who knew of him had already been aware of his presence. Not only did he tower over most of the people there, but his jovial brand of menace followed him everywhere, like a cloud threatening acid rain. At the announcement of his name, there came a low roar from the crowd, almost like thunder, as people beat their bodies and stomped their feet to welcome him. There was nothing pleasant about it, but it was clear that, for the regulars in the audience, there was a respect for Govart and what he brought to the ring.

The reaction to Damen's name was something quite different. The frenzy that erupted as the MC announced that Damen would be fighting could most accurately be likened to the delighted cries welcoming home a returning hero.

Laurent raised a sardonic eyebrow in Damen's direction, and Damen met his look with one of his own: not bemused, but pleased, almost but not quite humbled, as though he hadn't expected such a response, even though he knew he deserved it. Dancing on the edge between cocky self-assuredness and modesty in a way that Laurent found charming, despite himself.

Sometime during the earlier fights, Damen had gone off to find some more private corner to change in. He still wore his t-shirt, but he'd traded out his old jeans for a pair of shorts. Now that he had been announced, he carelessly stripped out of the shirt and handed it off to Laurent without a thought in the world for the fact that he was the one meant to be the personal assistant. Not that Laurent minded having someplace he could bury his hands, now turned to fists. No need to broadcast to Damen and everyone else in the room that he suddenly didn't have quite the same degree of control over himself as he had a moment ago.

Damen was massive and rippling as ever, of course, and despite the failure of Laurent's private experiments a few days previous, his body reacted accordingly. Sometimes Laurent wished he could divorce himself entirely from his physical self. He resolved to feel the warmth climbing up into his face, if he had to, but to ignore it and brush it off as the warmth of the room if Damen were to notice and point it out.

Fortunately, Damen was distracted with the fight about to begin. His golden-bronze skin already bore a faint sheen of sweat, as the room really was warm, but that -- like everything -- only seemed to heighten his presence, the pure physicality of him. It suited him. He looked good.

Laurent cleared his throat subtly (he hoped) and turned his eyes instead to the t-shirt balled up in his hands. After he collected himself, he looked up again to find Damen already watching him. He wouldn't have been surprised to see him entertained at Laurent's expense. Instead, his expression was soft. "Wish me luck?" he said, a faint trace of smile at the corner of his lip.

"I don't think you'll need it," Laurent said, opting to allow frank, if somewhat caustic, admiration into his tone, rather than bear the humiliation of trying and failing to hide it.

This made Damen laugh in the silent way he had sometimes, in private moments, though this was anything but private. It was all in his eyes, the way they dragged and lingered on Laurent's face.

And then it was time for him to go into the ring. He flashed one last look over his shoulder at Laurent, and then he was in the bubble where he would face off against Govart, a veritable nightmare figure from a children's story. It was heartening, though, to hear the crowd's response when Damen stepped into the ring. He was clearly well-loved here, despite the accident of years ago that had resulted in someone's death. Laurent's stomach twisted, but he pushed it aside. Nothing could be done about it now. He could only move forward, and right now, Damen was his ticket to Govart. Govart, who he needed and despised in equal measure.

When Govart stepped into the ring along with Damen, the crowd reacted again, though without the same jubilance they had shown for Damen. Still it was clear that this would be a good fight, and the crowd roared its approval at the match-up.

From his place in the corner, Laurent could see well enough to make out Govart's expression -- leering, confident, and crass -- and Damen's beautifully-sculpted back. Laurent wished he could see Damen's face, wondered what he would have found there. Maybe his own brand of easy self-confidence, maybe some glimmer of fear or nerves, maybe a simple desire to let his body out of its careful control and see what it could do.

And then at last the MC gave the signal, and the fight began.

Laurent, whose experience with such things extended about as far as the few fights he had just witnessed in this very room, didn't know what to expect. Some of the earlier fights had been quick and scrappy, some of them long battles of will and strategy, and still others endurance tests characterized by stamina, contests of who could take the greatest number of punches before going down.

It was clear that Damen and Govart were decent matches for each other in terms of size and weight, though they wore and held that weight differently on their bodies. But even given all he knew of each of them, he didn't know how those traits would translate to the fight.

Govart was prideful, prone to boasting. He gloried in violence and made a show of his own abilities. Damen, on the other hand, had confidence in himself, but he didn't wield it as a weapon unless he felt it necessary. And even then, only just enough to get his point across. If Govart was a hammer, Damen was a finely-made sword, ready in a moment to block a blow or press one precise point to the flesh of a throat, threatening something it could no doubt deliver but would only resort to if pushed.

For the first few seconds, they only circled each other, both of them watching every move, every flicker of thought cross each other's faces. The result of this was that after a moment, Laurent could see Damen's face. He found it transformed, serious and focused in a way he'd only seen glimpses of before. All of the easy amusement was gone now, and he regarded Govart with a singular focus, as though the rest of the room had melted away.

Govart watched Damen carefully as well, though his gaze was gloating, and his attention split between Damen and the room full of people surrounding them. That was why he would lose. Laurent felt no uncertainty on that point. He had never seen Damen fight before, but over the last weeks, he had come to know Damen. He knew what Damen was capable of. And he knew Govart's failings. Damen would win. Everything that came after was less certain.

It was Govart who made the first move. Laurent suspected that Damen had been waiting for him, allowing Govart to fill in the blank spaces of the information Laurent had given him.

Govart went for Damen's middle in a bid to bring him down outright. It had the element of surprise, but Damen was sturdier on his feet than Govart expected or hoped. The move surprised him, but he didn't go down, and when Govart backed away, Damen drove his fist into his opponent's belly, forcing him up, which he then took advantage of by driving another punch to Govart's jaw. The crowd screamed, but while these had been two good hits, neither of them threw Govart off any more than his surprise charge had Damen.

Another second, two seconds, as the opponents merely watched each other, trying to gauge what the other might do. This time Damen moved first, darting forward to Govart's side. Govart moved and blocked, and at the last moment, Damen saw it, and found what he had really been looking for. In blocking the feint, Govart had left his other side open, and Damen jabbed him again with a quick hit no doubt aimed toward the liver, though he missed by an inch or two. Govart didn't fall, but he did spin away, leaving himself open to another shot to his face.

Blood tingled high in Laurent's face, and he wasn't sure whether the flush came from seeing Damen's skill on display, or from watching Govart get punched in the face, but at the moment, he didn't feel especially concerned about it either way.

Govart threw a couple of punches himself next, one of which Damen dodged. The other struck home, nailing Damen in the solar plexus. If Laurent had been a different sort of person, he might have winced sympathetically. It hardly seemed to register to Damen though, who moved through the ring, in and out of Govart's reach, with a grace that belied his experience. There was strategy in what he did -- how he chose when to dart forward, when to hit, when to back away -- and yet he seemed almost blank as he fought, with none of the intelligence Laurent had come to expect from him showing openly in his face.

In other words, he knew what he was doing, and he fought with years' worth of experience and understanding of the game, but he moved instinctively. If he had been fighting anyone other than Govart, it would have been easy to get swept up entirely in watching him. Easy to follow the flow of his limbs as he ducked and swerved and struck with an almost elegant power.

After several minutes spent matching each other almost blow for blow, the fight took on a new edge. Everyone in the room could feel it, as evidenced by the growing tension. It was hard to pinpoint how exactly it changed the atmosphere -- everyone still yelled and shouted and jeered, as they had been all night, but there was a new frenzy to it as the dynamic inside the ring shifted.

Nothing obviously different had happened, nothing between the two fighters had changed. But as the fight dragged on, Govart grew increasingly frustrated, and as his frustration increased, so too did his desperation.

He launched at Damen more often, leaving himself open to Damen's calculated jabs and punches. Damen's demeanor changed too, subtly. Laurent might have expected him to bring out that same arrogance he sometimes wore draped around him like a cloak, now that it seemed obvious that it was only a matter of time before he would win, but he didn’t.

Instead, his focus refined itself further, razor-sharp as he watched every move Govart made, so that he could respond even before the move had been brought halfway to completion.

Laurent had a great deal riding on their success tonight, and nothing managed to quite tamp down the tension he himself felt in watching the fight, knowing that their whole plan hinged on Damen winning. Still, it would have been impossible to watch and not be affected by what he saw.

Damen was fierce and beautiful in the ring. Terrifying and fascinating as a big cat stalking its prey. His skin literally glowed in the bright lights overhead, and despite himself, despite everything, Laurent wished he could reach out and touch him, feel the muscles of his back and shoulders move beneath the palms of his hands.

He was so distracted for a moment that he almost missed the beginning of the end.

Govart, enraged now by his own inability to win the fight quickly and efficiently, reared back to throw a punch directly at Damen's face. Damen must surely have realized what he meant to do -- the whole room realized it -- but he allowed the blow to land, just beneath his left eye. It hit hard, with a visceral smack that could be heard even over the din of the crowd, but it didn't slow Damen for a moment.

He took the opportunity to duck in under Govart's decreased defense, and he hit him hard with an upper right hook. Govart nearly spun, almost comically, on his foot before finally dropping down to the floor. Damen backed away from him as the crowd went wild, screaming and cheering for their returned champion. No doubt celebrating their own good fortune as well. Laurent wondered how many people would be walking out of here with heavier pockets.

Damen kept his eyes on Govart, who had his knees up but still remained prone on the floor, until the MC had counted and called the fight for Damen. Only then did Damen finally smile in acknowledgment of his victory. He raised one bloodied fist into the air, for a moment or two, and then, like it was hardly a matter to talk about, let alone celebrate, he simply stepped back out of the ring and picked his way through the admiring crowd until he was standing, sweaty and bloody and breathless, in front of Laurent.

He was grinning in earnest now, a wide, easy smile that caused several things to happen in Laurent's chest at once, some of them painful. In some ways, it had been simpler when Damen had been resistant to the idea, when he had seemed to hate the thought of getting back into the ring.

But it was easy to see why he loved it, how his skill and his prowess, his sheer physical strength, could be allowed out in the ring. He was good: intelligent and fierce, quick and skilled. No wonder it brought out this light, this cheerfulness in him, no matter his past. It was easy to see, too, how something might go wrong in a fight like that. How easy it would be for a well-meaning person -- and Laurent understood, even if he didn't necessarily want to, that Damen was well-meaning -- to truly hurt someone, purely by nature of the fight.

"Laurent?" Damen asked. The smile had slipped from his face as Laurent drifted in his own thoughts.

"We need to find Govart before he leaves," Laurent said, and moved to step away from Damen, out into the room beyond, where the crowd was chattering and exchanging money, preparing to leave for the night. He tossed Damen's t-shirt at his chest, and tried not to look at it as he did so.

Damen caught his arm, gently, to stop him. "I could go talk to him myself, alone," he said.

A complex swirl of emotion bloomed in Laurent's chest. He hated the thought that Damen could tell, somehow, how little he relished the idea of speaking with Govart. He hated that Damen's response to seeing it was to try to get Laurent out of it. To take on the burden for himself. He hated that it was tempting to accept his offer. But he shook his head no.

"He'll be more likely to agree if he sees me," Laurent said.

Damen seemed to accept this without asking any questions. He shrugged back into his t-shirt, and it clung to him horribly, due to the sweat still practically dripping off of him. Laurent forced himself to turn away and instead scan the crowd for Govart. After a moment, he saw the man frustratedly shoving a fistful of bills into the MC's hand. The MC was grinning hugely. Evidently his own money had been on Damen.

Before they reached him, Govart had finished up his business and made for the door. Laurent didn't hurry after him. He would prefer to do this outside, in the cool, clean air and without any witnesses to hear, just in case.

"Govart," Laurent said, raising his voice just enough to ensure he would be heard, as he stepped out into the refreshing night.

Govart spun around, making no effort to hide his anger even before he knew who was speaking to him. When he saw Laurent, his face morphed into a nasty sneer. Before he could say anything unfortunate, Laurent went on.

"That was rather an embarrassing defeat you suffered at the hands of my friend here," Laurent said. He didn't bother to gesture at Damen, who he could practically feel standing behind him, radiating heat.

In a move that might have been startling for anyone who didn't personally know the man, Govart took a threatening step toward Laurent. In an instant, Damen was there, stepping up in front of Laurent to block Govart's way to him.

Startled, Laurent nevertheless tried to appear as though nothing about this had thrown him off. Based on the suddenly-impotent rage displayed clearly on Govart's face, he did a good job.

"Damen has agreed to offer you a rematch, at my request," Laurent said. He took a small slip of paper from his jacket pocket, with a date, time, and location already scribbled onto it.

Earlier in the day, Damen had asked him, "Won't he know that's the same time as your uncle's gala?"

Laurent had shaken his head. "He might, but he won't put it together if we make the rematch about you, and tell him to go somewhere else to meet you."

Sure enough, Govart took the paper when Laurent offered it to him, read it quickly, and didn't seem to think anything of it. "Why should I accept this?" he asked.

Laurent gave a careless shrug of his shoulder, as though it didn't particularly matter to him if he accepted the offer or not. "If reclaiming some dignity isn't enough of a draw, I'm sure we can make it worth your while. There will be some friends there."

"Friends?"

"Affluent friends."

Govart nodded slowly. No doubt he had a picture in his mind of some sort of underground event in the upper city, the power play of wealthy men watching blood sport for fun, the salacious promise of an illicit thrill. Good. Let him fill in the holes with his own imagination. That suited Laurent just fine, even if the thought of hosting such an event in reality turned his stomach. He didn't let Govart see it, allowed any sign of distaste on his face to read of his dislike of Govart himself, the very real contempt he felt for him transmuted, in Govart's mind, into something else entirely.

Or maybe Govart knew exactly how Laurent felt about him, and exactly why. The leering grin he bestowed on him after a moment's consideration certainly seemed to suggest it. He gave a brief, mocking bow, and without saying a word, he stalked off into the night alone.

"Do you think he'll show up?" Damen asked as he and Laurent made their way back to their own car.

"Yes," Laurent said. Between the chance to fight Damen again, getting Laurent in a relatively private setting, and the potential to make a substantial amount of money, the idea would be too tempting for Govart to pass up. "Good work in there," he added to Damen as they arrived at the car and slid into their respective seats. 

He turned the key in the ignition of Auguste's car and felt it wake quietly around him. Then he pressed his boot to the gas pedal. He had an appointment to make.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! If you feel like leaving comments and kudos, I certainly always love and appreciate them!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laurent proves his competence and Damen has a canon-typical reaction.

Damen didn't like this. And it wasn't just because he could feel the tender flesh beneath his eye already swelling from Govart's last punch to his face.

It had been about an hour since the fight, and Laurent had spent most of that time driving them to another dark corner of the city, closer to the outskirts, where they were even less likely to come across any police. Not that the police themselves gave Damen any less reason to fear -- more reason, in most cases. But while seeing Laurent in the crowded, rowdy room surrounding the ring had been strange, seeing him so close to the city's borders, so far beyond the reach of his own world, highlighted the kind of danger he was courting in a way the ring hadn't.

The ring was a facet of the lower city's culture, yes, but it was one that had always drawn in a significant audience from the upper city as well. The police knew about it and turned a blind eye, as long as nothing got out of hand. Half the audience had been people from Laurent's side of town. It may have been loud and aggressive and charged with violence, but Laurent had been safe there, even if he hadn't looked it.

But out here, everything was different.

Laurent pulled the car over on the side of the road. They were not technically outside the city limits, but it was close. The only buildings they had passed over the last two minutes they'd been driving -- and Laurent was the one doing the driving, so they covered a lot of ground in those two minutes -- had been small sheds and outbuildings, probably used for storage by those who lived on the edges of the city.

Delpha was primarily concentrated in its downtown. Nearly everyone worked there because of, or in spite of, the massive corporations -- such as DeVere Corp. -- which all operated out of the center of the city. So everyone lived there too.

Over the last decade or so, the population of the city had moved increasingly toward the central downtown. Less and less, people lived on the outer edges, as more and more, they were forced to move into sky-high apartment buildings in order to work for a living. There were no suburbs. There were no houses, not even for the wealthiest people who, like Laurent, lived in luxury apartments at the tops of the buildings they owned.

The result was that the outer city was practically wasteland. Dry ground that couldn't support much more life than patches of brown grass here and there, and an endless highway that stretched into the horizon and beyond. Damen knew, logically, that from this side of the city, the long road would lead eventually to Ios.

But looking at it now, it was impossible to imagine it ever coming to an end anywhere. Impossible to imagine the reality of any city other than his own, where he had lived his entire life. He had never been this far outside of Delpha's center, he realized with an unsettling shock.

As he had been thinking this, having just stepped out of the car and started staring into the distance where the road disappeared ahead, Laurent had been digging around in the front seat for something. He emerged to see Damen practically transfixed by the side of the endless highway, the vast expanse of empty, blank land that surrounded it now that they had left behind the steel and glass landscape of the city.

"Have you never seen a road before?" Laurent asked, and it broke Damen out of his reverie with a laugh.

"Not like this one," he said.

Laurent went on watching him for another moment, the car between them, and then he said, "We're late."

But Damen had spent the last moments looking around them, and there was nothing here. Laurent had pulled his beautiful car off the road and left it parked in the dust, but there was nobody else around. Only the long stretch of unbroken road.

Just then, however, the distant sound of a car horn blaring rent through the otherwise silent night. It came not from the road, but from the wilderness surrounding it, somewhere even further out, beyond a small rise in the land.

And then, to Damen's shock and chagrin, Laurent began walking toward the sound, abandoning the road and his car and marching into the empty wilderness. Not knowing what else he could do, Damen hurried after him.

He didn't bother asking where they were going or what they were doing -- Laurent hadn't said much about this part of his plan -- because he knew he wasn't likely to get an answer. Laurent clearly knew where he was going. He walked out into the open land as though there were a path beneath his feet.

Overhead, light pollution from the city blocked out most of the stars, but a few shone through here and there, like freckles on the deep blue of the night sky. Damen had only ever seen stars in photos before, and he tried not to trip over the uneven ground as he stared up at them.

Laurent seemed an entirely different creature here. In this vast emptiness, his money meant nothing. His status, his family, his name -- his uncle -- none of that mattered outside the context of Delpha. He had shed it all the moment he'd left his car behind. And, Damen understood suddenly, he had dressed the part. His t-shirt and jeans, his leather jacket, all had seemed like a costume at the ring. But here Damen understood that Laurent had never dressed for the ring, he had dressed for this, here and now, whatever part of his absurd plan was meant to come next.

It could have been anything, Damen realized. He might have been equally surprised and underwhelmed if Laurent had merely laid down in the grass to look at the stars, or if he had come here to murder someone in cold blood.

Neither, it turned out.

As they kept up over the gentle rise of the earth, what had been a growing, though still small, murmur of noise and voices suddenly caught, like a paper in flame, and Damen began to make out words here and there. Also, there came into view what he took at first to be a small encampment. At the center of it, there was a small fire built into a pit. Not large enough to be a bonfire, but still serving no practical purpose, except to light the scene.

The scene itself was made up of a dozen or so people, maybe a few more, all dressed as he and Laurent were dressed: simply and practically, with nothing especially distinctive or particular about their clothing. From a distance, these might have been folk from the lower city or businessmen from the upper city, there was no way to tell by their clothes.

However, also scattered around the otherwise-barren field were several small, speedy-looking cars, like Laurent's, and even some sleek, beautiful motorcycles parked right in the dust as though each of them hadn't cost more money than Damen would ever see in his life.

"What is this?" he asked Laurent.

Laurent strode beside him, confident as he made his way closer and closer to the gathering. "My side of the bargain," he answered.

While they had been discussing their plan to sabotage DeVere's official announcement of his new youth center opening, and after Damen had balked at the idea of fighting in order to bring this about, Laurent had assured him that the risk would not be his alone. But when Damen had pressed, Laurent refused to answer him as to what he would be doing. Damen had assumed, perhaps foolishly, that Laurent meant he would be handling the more business-oriented side of the arrangement, and that the extra-legal activities would be left in Damen's court.

Now, judging by the look of the setting below, Damen wondered if he hadn't gotten it almost entirely backwards.

In another moment, they had come down the hill and were level with the group milling around the fire, surrounded on all sides by beautiful vehicles. A few people looked up as they approached, but only Damen did they regard with any curiosity.

The impression Damen got, as their gazes flicked quickly over Laurent and then slid as quickly away from him, was that he was not an uncommon sight, and that no one wanted to be caught staring. Well, that was hardly a surprise, if they knew him at all. None of them wanted to invite any vitriol if they could help it.

Laurent marched past most of them and instead headed straight for a lone figure waiting just at the edge of the fire's light. Even from several yards out, Damen could tell the figure was beautiful, and small. He thought at first that he was looking at a woman -- a lover, maybe? Laurent had never mentioned anyone, but stranger things had happened, even if Damen couldn't quite think of any at the moment.

But no, the figure wasn't a woman, but a young man -- a very young man. A boy, Damen realized, as they finally drew up to him. And he was lovely, with gentle curls in his hair, which caught the light from the fire and glowed gold, and eyes as blue as Laurent's, though darker, as all of his coloring was slightly darker. But despite the inherent prettiness of him, his face was twisted into a scowl which buffed some of the effect away.

"Laurent," he said, by way of greeting, though there was nothing welcoming about his tone.

Damen was almost amused, even as he was a little startled and put-off. To look into Laurent's face and meet him with undisguised venom seemed charmingly daring to Damen. And it had an air of practice to it, as though the two of them were more familiar than this meeting suggested.

Laurent met the boy's gaze with a level look of his own, betraying neither amusement nor his own displeasure, so that Damen didn't know what familiarity they might share, even as he felt sure that they must share some.

"Nicaise," Laurent answered. "You've honored our agreement." His tone, too, gave nothing away. The words suggested surprise, but his voice remained cool and disaffected as ever.

The boy, Nicaise, sneered. "It wasn't charity."

"Of course." Laurent reached into one of the pockets of his jacket and removed something small and sparkling, though beyond that, Damen couldn't make it out. He placed it into Nicaise's outstretched, waiting palm (which he quickly snatched shut, so Damen still didn't make it out, though he saw a flash of blue in the limited light), and in exchange, Nicaise handed him a key.

This business apparently finished, Nicaise stalked off, with hardly a glance at Damen at all. Despite his miserably bad attitude, Damen couldn't help liking the kid, and he expressed as much to Laurent, in part to see how Laurent would respond to it.

But whatever he had expected to get out of Laurent on the subject, it wasn't what he was met with. Laurent looked back over his shoulder at the boy making his way closer to the fire, where he seemed to be welcomed if not with relish, then at least with acceptance. "I suppose he has his charms," Laurent said, mildly.

Something about the words, and the way in which Laurent said them, and the way in which Laurent's gaze now landed heavily on Damen's face, startled him and sent a chill down his spine. "That's not exactly what I meant," he said.

"No?" Laurent raised one uninterested eyebrow.

"I've never seen anyone brave enough to talk to you that way," Damen clarified.

Laurent nodded, mostly to himself it seemed, and turned away from Damen to inspect the thing to which the key belonged, if Damen had to guess: a small, simple motorcycle, its quality belied by its make rather than anything flashy or ostentatious. 

"Did you just trade a bit of jewelry for a bike?" Damen asked.

"I traded a bit of jewelry for the chance to ride the bike," Laurent corrected. He didn't seem particularly interested in discussing the matter, and Damen didn't care to risk life and limb to ask him about it.

It was hard to tell whether Laurent knew much about the thing just by the way he was looking it over. He may have known what he was doing, may have been looking for specific issues or details, doing a final check before he planned to ride it. Or it may all have been for show, an attempt to appear as though he belonged here, wherever "here" was, exactly.

Damen hadn't figured it out before Laurent straightened and stepped away from the bike. He looked over it once more, from the distance of a couple paces, placed the key into his jacket pocket, and then promptly turned away from Damen and the bike to head back toward the fire. Damen followed.

As soon as they reached the central fire, however, Laurent said, "Stay here," before heading off again, evidently searching for someone specific.

Summarily dismissed, Damen dropped heavily to the ground near the fire, where a few people were already sitting and chatting. He took care not to sit close enough to invite himself into any conversations where he wasn't wanted, but after a moment, a gruff-looking man waved him over closer to where he and a couple of others sat together talking and looking into the fire. In other circumstances, Damen might have expected to see them drinking, but he was glad that they weren't, given the number of vehicles sprinkled through the surrounding field.

"Never seen the Prince bring a guest before," the man said. He appeared to be Laurent's opposite in most ways -- Laurent who, in spite of his age, had more in common outwardly with the boy he'd called Nicaise than with any of these hardened men by the fire.

"The Prince?" Damen said, though of course he had an idea who the man must mean.

Sure enough, he pointed a little way off, where Laurent stood talking to a middle-aged man who himself looked a bit soft for these surroundings. Damen didn't recognize him. He had graying hair, and a neatly-trimmed beard to match. He leaned in close to Laurent, almost conspiratorial, and yet as Damen watched, the man tipped his head back in a laugh, and the image turned in a flash from conspiracy to flirtation. Bemused, Damen looked back to the man sitting beside him.

He couldn't find fault with the nickname. Laurent was spoiled, petty, and privileged as a prince, certainly. It didn't seem like a particularly charitable name, but at the same time, there had been something almost reverential in the way the man had said it.

The man introduced himself as Jord, and not having been told to do otherwise, Damen gave his real name. Even if any of these people knew of Akielos, they wouldn't have known about its inner workings. It was safe enough.

Jord pointed to his other companions -- Orlant, Lazar, Vannes, a few others, though the names slipped through the conversation and Damen didn't make much effort to hold onto them, as he doubted he would be seeing many of these people again -- but it was clear that what he really wanted to talk about was Damen himself, and he only held himself back for another moment or two.

"How long have you and the Prince been --" here he broke off and instead gave Damen a significant look, which Damen failed to interpret. Then, seeing that he had not been understood, Jord good-naturedly made a rude gesture with his hands to clarify.

Damen felt himself blanch, and he was grateful for the dim light of the fire to hide it. "No," he said quickly. "We don't -- it isn't like that. With us."

Jord gave him a skeptical look, and all of the color that had just drained from Damen's face now rushed back into it. 

"Really," Damen insisted. "I'm his personal assistant."

As soon as the words left his mouth, Damen felt how ridiculous they sounded in the cool night air. Dressed in his button-downs and freshly-pressed trousers, sitting alone in Laurent's apartment, he could slip easily enough into the fiction, which had, after all, always been a practical one, if not an especially reasonable one.

But out here, in the deep night, having just come out of a fist fight in a dusty basement, wearing only jeans and a t-shirt that clung to his body and left little about his strengths to the imagination, he could see how fragile a story it really was. Simply put, he did not look like someone Laurent kept around to manage his schedule.

As though sensing the shift in his ability to defend himself, several others descended, predators ambushing their wounded prey.

"Is he as prim and proper in bed as he is out here?" the woman, Vannes, asked.

"I knew it," Orlant put in, and when the others turned to look at him, he went on, with a satisfied grin, to say, "I knew all that ice was just to keep the fire in. Knew he'd spread when the right cock came along."

Despite everything, Damen almost felt a little bad for Laurent. If these were his friends, talking about him this way, he was even more alone than Damen had realized.

Of course, he reminded himself as he looked across to where Laurent was speaking to the same man, a precise arch to his eyebrow, he had largely brought this on himself, with the way he behaved toward people. Still, it was disrespectful, and while Damen, not so long ago, might have thought Laurent hadn't earned the respect that most of the world freely gave him, he had seen enough of the man now to know that not all was as it first appeared.

Laurent hadn't been handed status on a silver platter, despite all his privilege. At every turn, he had been ridiculed and dismissed by those who occupied the world he'd been born into. They didn't respect him at all. And yet, this had not turned him into any sort of sniveling or pathetic figure, as Damen might have guessed from someone handed ease and niceties but not responsibility.

Instead he had spent every moment of his life fighting. Fighting in fine clothes and amidst luxuries most people could never imagine, but fighting nevertheless. On his own, without support. Without even love, Damen realized with a pang, after his brother had died.

Without his noticing, Laurent had disengaged from the man he'd been speaking with through all of this, and he appeared in front of the group now, standing over them, looking down at them all with his easily imperious gaze.

"Pardon the interruption," he said, without a hint of irony. "You'll have to go on speculating whether my assistant bends me over the kitchen island later. Torveld has agreed to a race."

Ignoring the mixed reactions from those around him -- a few snickers and more than a dose of embarrassment too -- Damen pushed to his feet and rushed after Laurent, who had already turned his back on the gathering and made his way back over to the bike Nicaise had apparently brought here for him. For him to race. Somehow Damen hadn't seen that coming. Probably because it was insane.

They were in the middle of nowhere, miles away from anyone who could help them if anything went wrong. Damen was the only person here to back Laurent up at all, and he didn't know anything about street racing. And they didn't even have a helmet. But as Damen presented these arguments, Laurent merely watched him, waiting for him to finish, before he produced a helmet from where it had hung on the other side of the bike.

"Satisfied?" he asked, infuriatingly calm as ever.

Of course Damen was not satisfied, and even though he knew Laurent well enough by now to know that he would not change his mind, he had no problem letting him know how dissatisfied he truly was with the plan.

"What am I going to do about your uncle if I have to scrape you off the pavement and into a bucket after this?"

The truth was more complicated. Damen's heart was pounding hard in his chest, a kind of fear he didn't often feel. He had lived long enough in the rougher parts of his city, made his way through trials Laurent had never had to face. He was strong, and he knew how to use his strength to best advantage. It had been many years since he'd lost a fight. He hadn't felt this sort of animal fear for himself in a long time.

But he felt it now, beating in him, knowing that whatever was about to happen, it was out of his hands. He could only trust that Laurent knew what he was doing, that this was just as important to him as it was to Damen, that he wouldn't risk it all on a gamble he didn't think he'd win.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Damen found that he did trust Laurent, at least in this. He trusted Laurent to give a fair assessment of his own abilities. He had, he understood suddenly, never seen Laurent fail. That didn't mean he wouldn't crash and drag himself a mile down unbroken highway, so that all Damen would find of him at the end would be a mangled vehicle and a bloody, pulpy mess on the pavement. But it did mean there was nothing Damen could do but wait and see -- short of picking Laurent up, slinging him over his shoulder, and carrying him back to the car.

Where would that leave them, after all? Laurent had given the matter careful consideration -- Damen knew he had, because he gave every matter careful consideration -- and he had determined that they needed something from Torveld to achieve their mutual goal. He had decided that this was the best way to get it. He had decided it was worth the risk. And so, it was worth the risk.

Laurent hadn't deigned to respond to Damen's last argument. He had simply waited, his eyes unyielding on Damen's, until Damen reached the same conclusion Laurent himself had made some time ago. Bizarrely, Damen wished he had stopped Laurent with a hand on his wrist, so that he might have felt Laurent's own pulse speed up, so that he could now release him.

Somehow Laurent understood that Damen was relenting anyway. He didn't say anything, but he put the helmet on, secured it in place, and swung his leg over the bike, effectively forcing Damen back a couple steps. It was clear he did not feel he needed Damen's approval, and Damen wondered for a moment why it was that Laurent had brought him here at all. Clearly these people knew him. He had been here before, done this before.

But then, of course, Damen realized. Such events would have been organized well in advance. Laurent needed to be here, on this night in particular, to get what he wanted from Torveld, whatever it was. And he had needed Damen to be at the ring, to manipulate Govart into being where they needed him when they needed him there. With Damen on his side, Laurent knew the best way to do that was to have Damen beat him in a fight, so he would be motivated to meet them for a rematch later. The fact that the two events happened on the same night was merely one acceptable inconvenience in an otherwise faultless plan.

Damen would almost have admired it, if it wasn't so infuriating.

As Laurent turned the key in the ignition of the bike and rode carefully forward to the long stretch of highway, Damen rejoined the others. They had gathered into a huddle along the side of the road. For the first time, Damen paid a little more attention to what they wore, and found that many of them were in leather jackets, rough jeans, some were even wearing gloves.

The vehicles parked around them were a mix of bikes, like the one Laurent was currently riding, and sleek, expensive cars built for speed. These were clearly people from the upper city, as Laurent was, but they were none of them new to whatever this was. Did they gather here to race? Or was the racing merely a byproduct of having such a group of people and flashy vehicles all together in one place?

Damen found what he hoped was a less insulting way of putting this and set the question to Jord, who chuckled. He explained that they were almost an unofficial club. Some of them loved the cars, loved to be around them, and came primarily to watch. Some of them -- like the Prince, he said -- came for the racing. Though it had been a while since the Prince had raced himself. He seemed, Jord explained, not to have the same easy access to his bikes that he'd had in the past. That must have been why he'd needed Nicaise to bring his bike to him tonight. Damen wondered why he didn't just race his car instead, in that case, but Jord shook his head and shrugged. He didn't know.

"And is he," Damen began, but faltered when he realized he didn't know how to ask the question diplomatically.

But Jord met his eye with a look of sly mischief. "Any good?" he said, guessing what Damen had been about to ask.

Damen nodded.

"See for yourself," Jord replied by way of answer.

Down the road by a couple hundred feet, back in the direction of the city, Laurent and Torveld had lined up their bikes side by side, only a few feet of space between them. The spectators spread out so that everyone had a good view, and a few people crossed the street quickly to watch from the other side.

Damen couldn't imagine the race would be long, since the road was one straight stretch of highway, but it hardly seemed to matter in the moment. A lot could happen in even a few seconds.

Even if Laurent himself was good enough to pull this off, Torveld might make a mistake. He could spin out or crash and easily take Laurent down with him. In less time than it would take Damen to draw in a breath, Laurent could be in pieces on the highway. The thought brought something squirming and uncomfortable to life in Damen's belly, a sort of nervousness that had nothing to do with the fact that if Laurent's plan failed, it would leave Akielos back at square one, and his whole mission of the past weeks wasted.

From a distance, Damen and the other spectators heard the engines revving on the bikes. Across the street from where Damen watched, Nicaise seemed to wander almost carelessly out into the center of the road. He had a small, delicate-looking white kerchief in his hand. Even more than the bike itself, it seemed such an adult article for him to possess, and the moment was suspended in a sort of surreality for several seconds as he held the kerchief up, dropped it with a little flourish, and hopped back over to his side of the road.

The unreality of the moment extended as the bikes roared into sudden and undeniable life. Damen's eyes were on Laurent from the moment Nicaise had dropped his kerchief, and they didn't leave him now.

His face was hidden by the helmet, but every line of his body seemed, impossibly, to telegraph his capability. He knew how to sit the bike, knew how to drive it forward. His balance, his control, his shifting were all perfect. He either had a natural talent for it, or he had been driving, and racing, for a long time. Years, maybe, despite his young age. Nothing held him back as he shifted subtly, nosing in front of Torveld just so as they both hurtled down the road.

Damen found himself breathless, watching, caught up in the strange and particular beauty of seeing man and machine work toward the same purpose.

It was like, somewhat, seeing Laurent behind the wheel of his car -- his brother's car -- in that it was clear he was comfortable there in a way he seldom appeared anywhere else. But where the car had always seemed to envelope and overtake Laurent, making him small, hiding him from the outside world, on the bike Laurent had a power that was entirely his own, a part of the world around him, rather than swept away from it, and utterly at his ease in that power.

Adrenaline pulsed through Damen as though it were him speeding through the night. Everything about the scene presented itself Laurent-first.

He was aware of the night air having turned cooler because he wondered how the whipping wind felt in Laurent's hair where it flew around the edges of his helmet. He smelled the dry earth surrounding them and the fire still flickering behind the row of spectators, the burn of rubber on the pavement, because he knew Laurent would be aware of these things, taking in the whole scene as he sped through it. The stars overhead sparked to celebrate Laurent's victory.

Because that he would be victorious hardly seemed up for debate by the time he and Torveld had covered half their distance. Unless Laurent made some fatal mistake, his win was almost certain. He had pulled ahead by half the length of his own bike, and with only a few seconds to go, there was almost no question that he would remain so by the end.

Not that he let up, or took the rest of the race easily, as he might have done. Of course not. It would not be enough for Laurent to beat Torveld. He would rout him, if he could.

And it looked increasingly like he could.

As every precious fraction of a second passed, Laurent maintained his lead and even, centimeter by centimeter, continued to pull ahead as the road disappeared beneath him.

It was hard to look away from Laurent to see what Troveld was doing, to see whether this had ever been a fair race to begin with, but Damen made himself do it. And found that Torveld, too, was perfectly competent. It was only that Laurent had skill leagues beyond what he possessed.

Laurent's nickname among this group smacked suddenly of irony in a way it hadn't before. This was no pampered, pretty princeling playing games with his uncle's fancy toys. The others here might have raced purely for the fun of it, for the adrenaline rush and the game of chance and risk. But racing, to Laurent, was a sport, and he had dedicated himself to it as he had to everything he cared about, as Damen was learning.

The final few seconds of the race would have been embarrassing to watch, if Laurent's opponent hadn't known what he was getting into. Distracted as Laurent leaned in toward him, Torveld bungled some small shift and fell another few inches behind, so that as the two bikes sped past the spectators, there could be no question in anyone's mind who had won by a significant margin.

Damen caught his breath all at once, feeling a little dazed by the spectacle, the unequivocal proof of Laurent’s capability. He felt, perhaps a little unhinged, the desire to go to him at once, to put his hands on his body, both to prove to himself that it was truly Laurent who had done this, his own body housing his familiarly sharp mind, and to make sure he hadn't been hurt somehow. Of course, he would have known if Laurent had been hurt. He would have seen it happen. But he couldn't shake the raw feeling, and he waited with some anxiety as Laurent and Torveld slowed to a stop several yards away.

Each of them dismounted and pulled their helmets off, and for a moment, all Damen could do was stare.

Laurent's hair, mussed and no less lovely for being dampened now with sweat, cascaded down around his shoulders and face as he pulled the helmet away. His eyes, even from this distance, were bright and fierce with victory. He didn't smile, exactly, but neither was his mouth twisted or compressed into the hard line he usually strapped it into to hide all semblance of feeling, beyond irritation.

In short, he looked bright and alive in a way Damen had never seen him before. High on his success, maybe, but it was more than that. He had been enjoying this. He had been having fun.

The discomfort in Damen's belly leapt suddenly to his chest, where it panged and throbbed for a long moment. For the first time since meeting the man, he found himself wishing he had Laurent's ability to mercilessly quash any unwanted feeling.

Laurent held out his hand to Torveld, and the other man took it with a jovial shake. If he was upset about losing to Laurent, it didn't show in his face. The two exchanged a few words while they were still far enough away that no one could hear, and then they made their way back to the group amid some cheering and shouts, raunchy comments, but also applause.

By the time they made it back to the rest of the group, Laurent had regained some of his usual composure, but he allowed the not-quite smile to remain on his face, and even he couldn't hide the light in his eyes. Damen felt the same pang in his chest all over again as Laurent strode up to him, the gloves he'd worn for the race still on his hands, the helmet tucked casually beneath one arm.

"Seems we've both had success tonight," he said.

"So it would seem," Damen agreed. He found he couldn't keep his eyes from lingering on Laurent's, but maybe it didn't matter, because Laurent didn't tear his gaze away either. Instead they stood for a long moment, simply looking at each other, and Damen felt something that he couldn't name -- or wouldn't -- shift into place.

Finally, Laurent stepped away, which seemed to take some degree of effort, Damen noticed with a not inconsiderable dose of pride. He rejoined the rest of the group for a few minutes of friendly cajoling, which Laurent permitted from the others, though he did not personally partake.

Damen stood a little way off, watching the way Laurent's body moved. Covered up as ever, he nonetheless had a different sort of grace to him in these clothes than he did in the business attire Damen usually saw him in. His power, in his usual getup, was a subtle one, almost insidious. A snake in the grass, camouflaged so that when the bite came, you never saw it coming. Now, tonight, in his dark jeans and his leather jacket, he made no attempt to hide what he was.

Striking, powerful. Stunning. He was a force of nature, and you would see him coming before he hit, and thank him for doing it.

As though sensing Damen's attention, Laurent looked up from where he had been listening to Vannes speaking with Orlant. He had, again, regained more of his composure, though the peculiar brightness in his eyes hadn't faded. And now he fixed it on Damen as he stalked across the dry grass to meet him.

Damen didn't know what he expected Laurent to say, but when he opened his mouth, he said, "Let's go home," and the words slid into place beneath Damen's skin.

Laurent didn't bother to say goodbye to the others, and none of them seemed surprised to see him go. Damen turned back once to raise a hand, as a sort of  _ nice to meet you _ in combination with an apology for running off so unceremoniously. He got a few smirks back, but tried not to dwell on them.

The car ride back into the city was quiet. Something changed again in the air between them, now that they were alone and shut away from the rest of the world. The brilliance of their combined victory didn't fade, but it did take on a softer sort of glow in the solitude of the car. Laurent changed again as well. He seemed somehow less ceremonious. He was no longer projecting his triumph outward, for the consumption of others, but merely enjoying it privately.

It made him seem younger, but also more human. With his hair a mess and the leather gloves still on his hands, he was a man in a way that was both simple and enticing. Damen realized that what he was seeing was Laurent at home in his own body, rather than merely as a mind occupying it.

Every once in a while, he glanced away from the road to look at Damen instead. There was something akin to nerves in these glances, though that didn't seem quite right. Anticipation, maybe. Or maybe that was what Damen wanted to see. He couldn't deny the tension he himself felt, like a taut wire between them, sitting less than two feet apart in the seat of the car.

He couldn't shake the feeling that something had changed. In fact, it was harder to hold onto all the things that remained the same. Down to their clothing, they were different tonight than they had ever been with each other. Damen felt more himself than he had in weeks. With evidence of the fight with Govart still clinging to him, his knuckles bruised and bloody and keeping him rooted in the present moment, he felt more himself than he had in months, maybe.

And Laurent beside him, youthful and brilliant and alive, his icy exterior cracked to reveal something else beneath. Damen wanted, with a sudden thrill that ran through his entire body, to sink his fingers into those cracks and rend them, irrevocably, open. To find out for himself what exactly lay beneath. And if the tightly-held energy rolling off of Laurent was anything to go by, he thought that maybe, if he was lucky, Laurent wanted that too.

The drive seemed to take both too long and no time at all. When they finally arrived back at Laurent's building, the tension had grown into something sharp and brittle. With anyone else, Damen would have been confident. He would have followed Laurent happily back up to the loft on the top floor. He would have been sure that, when he reached out, his touch would be welcomed. He would have drawn Laurent to him easily.

But Laurent was not anyone else. He hadn't said a word since he'd climbed into the car, and he didn't say a word now. He led Damen to the elevator, and then down the hall to his apartment. He opened the door, and Damen followed him inside.

And then they both stopped, hovering near each other, but out of arm's reach, just inside the loft. Laurent shut and locked the door, as always, and then seemed immediately not to know what to do next.

They hadn't left any lights on when they'd left earlier in the evening, and so the place was lit only with the blue glow from the city below. Damen felt as though he were flying over it, insulated from everything but the ice of Laurent's gaze. Feeling uncertain, something he wasn't particularly accustomed to feeling, Damen took one step forward, closer. Laurent allowed it, so he took another, and Laurent allowed this too.

Almost funny to think that being allowed within two steps of Laurent emboldened him, but Laurent had stopped him across the room with a look before. It felt wild to be allowed so close now. But he didn't let it go to his head. Instead, he slowed down even more, aware all along of Laurent's eyes still on him, trailing now over his shoulders, his chest, and down. There was appreciation in his gaze, stark and even expectant in a way. Damen took another step and slowly raised his hand to touch a place on Laurent's face where the helmet had pressed, leaving a small pink dent in the skin that would fade before morning.

Laurent's jaw tightened at the touch, and Damen stilled immediately, ready to draw back. But Laurent took the final step forward himself, drawing shut the space between him like the close of two buttons.

For a long moment, they only stood that way, close enough to feel the heat from one another's bodies, close enough that Damen could feel cool air drift past him as Laurent took in a long, steadying breath.

When Damen leaned down close to him, it was the gentlest thing he'd ever done. Somehow he understood that Laurent may still startle, might yet turn from him and look at him icily once before shutting himself into his bedroom and locking the door, firmly putting Damen in his place: on the other side of it.

Damen carefully and meticulously erased any expectations from his mind as he exerted only the slightest pressure at Laurent's jaw, tipping his face up so that the angle was perfect as Damen leaned slowly, slowly in.

The tension didn't drain from Laurent as Damen brushed their lips softly together once, and then again. But he had closed his eyes, and when Damen lifted his other hand to cup Laurent's face, not only did he not startle, he seemed almost to melt into Damen, sinking closer to him in a way that might have been entirely unintentional.

Feeling truly bold now, Damen pulled away just far enough to touch another soft kiss to the tender, fragile flesh just beneath Laurent's eye where his golden lashes fluttered against his cheek. Laurent hadn't been expecting that, and he drew in a sharp breath, parting his lips. Damen took advantage and pressed another kiss to Laurent's full lower lip, allowing Laurent to be the one to deepen it, to open to him, which he did.

This, finally, did seem to almost shock him, and Laurent pulled away. He looked up at Damen with wide eyes, and even in the dim light, Damen could see how the pools of black in their centers had grown, leaving only a thin rim of cool blue surrounding them.

Laurent didn't speak, and Damen didn't dare puncture the moment with words. He stood very still, and he waited, knowing that this might end here, and knowing that as painful as that would be, he would accept it and go to his own room and never mention this again, if that was what Laurent wanted.

Finally, Laurent stepped back from him. Then again. He turned and headed deeper into the loft, toward the hall. Damen felt something crumple and wither inside him, but he quickly shuttered it away. And then, miraculously, Laurent turned back to face him again, just before he stepped into the hallway that led to his room. "Well?" he said, his tone landing just shy of imperious, and Damen rushed to follow him.

Laurent might almost have laughed then, Damen was too busy being flooded with relief and adrenaline to carefully read the shifting of Laurent's face in the dark.

The dark didn't last long, however. Laurent opened the door to his bedroom and led Damen inside, but as soon as Damen realized he meant to leave the lights off, he rectified the situation immediately himself. 

Starkly lit, Laurent was as beautiful as he'd ever been. More, with his hair still ruffled from the helmet, his casual clothing clinging to his body in ways that were nothing short of tantalizing. Again, Damen reminded himself not to expect anything in particular to come out of the situation, but this grew harder and harder to hold onto as Laurent met his eyes and slowly, carefully, began to tug his gloves from his hands.

As the long, agile fingers came free from the leather, Damen had the inexplicable thought that he would have liked to put them in his mouth, to feel them on his tongue, to taste the sweat and leather there, in the valleys between them. The only thing that held him back from doing just that was the gaze, heavy and implacable, that Laurent had pinned him with.

Damen tried his luck: he took a step forward and, not being stopped, took another as Laurent tossed the discarded gloves onto a chair beside him. Now, though, Laurent put out one pointed finger so that it pressed into Damen's chest, stopping him, holding him at bay. Damen swallowed around his own arousal, which was becoming painful through all parts of him.

Laurent released him then, but not, Damen thought, so that he could move. Instead, he remained standing where Laurent had stopped him, less than a foot of space between their bodies, as Laurent unzipped the leather jacket and shed it from around his shoulders, dropping it too into the chair. This left him in only his t-shirt (surreal and strange to see him wearing such a thing, but Damen couldn't deny the way it made him hot under the collar of his own) and jeans.

Evidently he believed this was enough for now, because he stopped shedding clothing and instead reached out to Damen. In a move that surprised him, Laurent reached for the button on Damen's own jeans, rather than his shirt, first. With a precise few movements of his deft fingers, Laurent had undone the button and lowered the zipper, freeing him to sharply pull the jeans down Damen's hips in one quick movement. While he had done this, Damen had pulled his own shirt off over his head. He couldn't rush Laurent out of his clothes, after all, but he could certainly free himself of his own.

Stripped of everything but his briefs, Damen failed to feel remotely modest, not when he saw the naked stare Laurent passed freely over his body.

"You needn't look so pleased with yourself," Laurent said, though he didn't sound at all as though he minded.

Damen grinned. "No," he agreed, "you're pleased enough for both of us."

Laurent narrowed his eyes, but again, Damen had the sense that he enjoyed this gentle bantering, even if he wanted to play at being annoyed. In response to this, he put his hands, palm-flat, on Damen's shoulders. Thinking Laurent might be about to kiss him again, Damen was surprised when he felt the world tip beneath his feet and realized Laurent had instead pushed him down onto the bed.

His breath left him with the surprise of it, so that when Laurent crawled onto the bed over him, he didn't have any left to betray himself with a sigh. Once there, though, Laurent hesitated. His eyes were large and wide on Damen, on his face and on his body, so it didn't seem that he was having second thoughts, but rather that he wasn't sure what to do, now that he had Damen on the bed.

Well, Damen could help him with that, happily.

He got a grip on Laurent's trim waist and, not feeling any resistance, swiftly flipped Laurent onto his back. This did provoke a quick intake of startled breath from Laurent, but that was the only sound he made. Damen looked closely at his face, trying to determine whether there was any sign that the sudden change had been unwelcome, but Laurent only stared at him, somewhat dazed maybe, and not exactly pliant, but for all appearances willing.

Still, the tension that had been wrapped around him since the car ride home was still there. Damen determined that he would move slower, as slow as possible, to ease Laurent into it.

"Nervous?" he asked, teasing maybe, or maybe prodding, a little, at Laurent's defenses.

Laurent seemed to sense the difference, because where before he had clearly been play-acting at annoyance, now it was real.

In response to Laurent's glare, Damen said, "You have done this before?" as much to assure himself as to tease Laurent. It was only after he said it that it occurred to him Laurent really may not have done this before. It was easy to forget how young he truly was, just a few weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday. And while Damen had been far from a virgin himself at that age, he wouldn't be surprised to learn that Laurent had had neither the opportunity nor the inclination before now.

Laurent met his suddenly-serious gaze with an arched brow. "This?" he repeated, choosing to use the moment, of course, to call Damen out for his assumption.

Despite himself, Damen laughed. "You know what I mean."

Laurent did seem to soften to some degree, though he didn't stop looking somewhat peevish. "I'm not a virgin, if that's what you mean," he said, and Damen decided that this would have to be enough for now.

But, slow, he reminded himself. He would take this slow.

In truth, he didn't mind the idea of savoring this. Laurent was beautiful, spread out beneath him. When Damen had flipped him onto his back, he'd thrown one arm up to steady himself, catching his hand in the nest of pillows at the head of the bed. And he'd left it there now, in a pose of casual ease that wasn't quite picked up by the rest of his body.

And it wasn't just seeing him here, like this, that caused Damen's body to thrum with anticipation and the delicious sort of thrill that came with making himself push forward at such a deliberate pace. It wasn't just Laurent's body, which had been enticing since the first time Damen had seen him, or how it looked dressed in these easy, comfortable clothes.

It was that this was  _ Laurent _ , untouchable and distant, cool and treacherous as pavement slicked with black ice. Laurent who never backed down from a battle, who calculated risks and odds meticulously, who broke into office buildings and raced motorcycles with the same dedication to craft and ability.

Damen sat back, his eyes never leaving Laurent's, and Laurent watched him go, his jaw tight but his lips parted. His desire lived in his gaze, which was hot and open as Damen moved.

Laurent had not yet removed his boots, and so Damen turned his attention to them now. He wrapped one hand around Laurent's ankle, gauging his reaction which, as always, was carefully restrained. Not wanting to give Laurent the idea that he was going to hold him still, Damen kept his grip gentle as he lifted Laurent's foot from the bed.

Slowly, Damen removed the boot and the soft sock beneath and dropped them to the floor. Impulsively, and without giving himself a moment to interrogate the impulse, he bent his head to press a chaste, gentle kiss to the delicate arch of Laurent's foot. Beneath his hand, Laurent's muscles tensed, but a quick glance at his face told Damen it had not been in any sort of distaste. Rather, he was watching Damen with those wide, almost bewildered eyes, as though he had been startled into pleasure.

Encouraged, Damen shifted his grip slightly on Laurent's ankle and pressed another kiss to the bone there, and then another on his calf before moving to remove his other boot and giving it the same treatment.

"Are you always this," Laurent said, his voice coming out rougher than Damen had heard it before, "meticulous?"

Warmth spread through Damen like water. "I would be," he said.  _ If you wanted it _ , he held back.

For the first time since this had begun, color flushed into Laurent's face, high on his cheeks, as though he had heard the words Damen had decided at the last minute to keep to himself. Then, feeling daring all of a sudden, feeling that Laurent could do with hearing the words and positive, for some reason, that he wouldn't hold them against Damen, he said, "I would do anything you asked of me."

Laurent merely looked at him for a long moment, that pink color still diffuse and pretty in his face. It was as though now that he had been given this, he didn't know what to do with it. But then, "Kiss me," he said, and Damen gently released his ankle to crawl up the bed and do just that.

Like the one in the living room, this kiss began with a tentative touch of Damen's lips to Laurent's. But unlike the kiss in the living room, Laurent opened to Damen almost immediately, perhaps because Damen chose that moment to shift some of his weight down, allowing his body to touch Laurent's for the first time.

Still, he moved slowly, letting his hips settle against Laurent's, but otherwise not moving, letting Laurent control the pace where they had made contact.

The result was that he deepened the kiss, but he kept the rest of his body utterly still. Damen followed his lead, bringing one hand up to cup the back of Laurent's head to give him a better angle, but otherwise refusing to move except to meet Laurent's kisses.

At the first tentative brush of Laurent's tongue, Damen met that too, and when he felt some small noise building in his chest, he didn't try to suppress it. Beneath him, Laurent shivered in response. Damen took this as a good sign, and he shifted his angle again so that he could take Laurent's mouth as he had been wanting to all along.

Laurent broke away to breathe then, and Damen simply moved down to press an open-mouthed kiss to Laurent's neck, which had him arching up just slightly off of the bed and clutching at Damen's shoulders with both of his hands. 

Damen considered teasing him for his sensitivity, but then he was afraid Laurent might take it personally and batten down his reactions even more, so he didn't dare. Instead, he made it his mission to see how many such surprised, pleased reactions he could coax from him.

He went on kissing Laurent's neck, nuzzling his nose into the crook of it to smell him, all fresh linen and leather, maybe a trace of gasoline from the motorcycle, which sent a shock of heat rolling through Damen from his navel to his toes. As he kissed and nipped at Laurent's neck, his fingers worked beneath the hem of the white t-shirt, beginning to push it up.

Laurent's reaction to this was so subtle Damen would have missed it in anyone else, but he was aware of Laurent's shivering, trembling just slightly as more and more of his body became exposed. Damen might have thought it modesty, if Laurent had ever shown any inclination toward humility of any kind. Since he hadn't, Damen didn't know what to make of it, but Laurent didn't stop him as he sat back and pushed the shirt up over Laurent’s chest. Laurent sat up enough to discard the shirt, and then he laid back down again.

Making sure to keep his hands gentle, Damen dragged them lightly down Laurent's arms until they found his wrists, which he then lifted over his head to press down into the pillows. Laurent was smaller than Damen, but he had strength in his body that was evidenced by muscle he usually kept so carefully tucked away into his pristine clothing. He could easily have freed himself from Damen's grip, if he'd wanted to. Damen made his hands a suggestion, rather than a demand, and Laurent remained still beneath him.

He pressed another kiss, and another, hotly to the dampened crook of Laurent's neck, still holding Laurent's hands over his head, but then he dipped further down, allowing his lip to drag over Laurent's fine skin as he went.

He felt intoxicated. He was being carried on a wake he hardly knew how to predict, and it left him feeling somehow both powerful and weak, at the mercy of something far greater than himself, but at the same time, knowing what he was capable of doing with his own hands. He didn't know how to express any of this in words, or whether that would even be a good idea. Instead he put his entire body to the task of expressing it for him.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, he found himself nuzzling into the soft join of Laurent's arm and his chest.

"What are you --" Laurent began, but he didn't finish asking his question, instead biting it off to suppress some other reaction.

Damen was glad of it, because he didn't think he could have answered Laurent even if his tongue hadn't been busy laving at the soft flesh he had found there. In his hands, Laurent's wrists were shaking in earnest now, but he made no word or sound of protest, and when Damen briefly looked up from his heady task, he saw the column of Laurent's neck bared, as his head was thrown back in something that looked remarkably, thrillingly, like ecstasy.

In fact, despite the jeans that still clung to Laurent's hips and thighs, Damen had the distinct impression that Laurent had chosen to bare himself fully to Damen, and that this was a decision that he continued to make, second-by-second. The animal desire to submit his body at fundamental odds with the human one to protect himself.

Not wanting Laurent to regret his decision, Damen returned to his task. But Laurent's response to this made him curious, and he wondered what else he could try. He sank further down the bed, regrettably freeing Laurent's wrists in the process, his mouth open against Laurent's side, the curve of his ribs, and finally his belly, which was soft to the touch, at the surface, but hard with muscle beneath, as most of Laurent seemed to be. Taken again by that primal feeling that raced through him, the surge of the ocean inside, Damen sank in his teeth.

A deep, roughened sound escaped Laurent's throat, and the quality of his breathing changed, turned harsh in his chest. When Damen looked up at him now, he found Laurent staring back down at him. There was something complicated in his gaze. It was clear that this new, strange development of Damen's had sent a flash of arousal through him, but equally clear was that he wasn't quite sure how he felt about it.

For a moment, Damen lied to himself. Told himself that they would have time to explore it further, if Laurent permitted it. For now, he moved on, sinking lower, his fingertips catching at the button on Laurent's jeans. He made quick work of them, not thinking twice about discarding them to the floor, even though he knew they'd probably cost a month's worth of winnings from the ring. Again, he looked up, hovering and waiting before tucking his fingers into the waistband of Laurent's navy blue briefs.

"May I?" he asked, knowing and not caring that he probably had open, raw desire written all over his face.

Laurent huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh and nodded. Damen tugged the briefs down and away, tossing those to the floor as well, leaving Laurent exposed to the warm air of the bedroom and to Damen's gaze. He only looked, for several seconds, and Laurent showed no sign of concern about this. If it bothered him to be on display in this way, despite the fact that usually he covered himself from toe to tip, it didn't show in his manner.

He was easy and confident in his beauty, despite being far less easy, it seemed to Damen, in the actual physical fact of his body. He knew he looked good, but he struggled to find ease in his own physicality. Damen filed this information away for later study. For now, he lowered his head, spreading his fingers over Laurent's thighs.

But he did not immediately apply his mouth to Laurent's cock. In fact, he could hardly tell whether Laurent wanted him to. He hadn't said as much, and he'd reacted equally to Damen's mouth on his neck, the tender juncture of his arm, his belly. Best to take this slowly, too, then.

Damen traced a line with his tongue into the crease of Laurent's hip and was rewarded with the feeling of Laurent's thighs trembling in his grip. He did it again on the other side, tasting traces of sweat and something particular that he couldn't name, something that probably didn't have a name at all. Something that was distinctly Laurent, and only present for Damen now because every part of his body wanted this so badly that it would allow him to perceive whatever might get him to its intended end more quickly.

He ignored it, his own body's need, and dedicated himself instead to reducing Laurent to a writhing mess -- or as close to it as Laurent was likely to get. He pressed the tip of his tongue into the hollow between hip and thigh and dragged it slowly upward. For several long moments, he did nothing but devote his full attention to these places, sometimes with the tip of his tongue, sometimes with the full flat of it.

Every once in a while, Laurent pulled against his grip, but not as though he was trying to get away, only as though he had temporarily lost his rigid control over his body. Damen quickly learned to relish these moments.

If Laurent was still wondering what exactly Damen was up to, he had stopped trying to ask. Instead, he seemed to have given himself over to it, whatever it was. But finally, Damen judged that he was ready for more, and he pulled himself away from the dip of his thigh and turned his attention to the straining cock instead. It was lovely, in a way Damen had only occasionally thought before. Pleasantly proportional to the rest of his body, pink in a way that complimented the rest of his coloring, and sporting a gentle, elegant curve. Damen's lips parted, looking at it, but before he could do anything, Laurent spoke.

In a disconcertingly cool voice, he said, "I won't."

Won't? Won't accept? Damen, who personally found himself quite beyond words, merely waited for clarification.

Laurent, after a moment, said, "Just don't -- expect anything of me."

Damen felt himself sigh, almost laugh, with relief. "Never," he promised, and he lowered his head.

Still, he didn't take Laurent fully into his mouth. Now more than ever it seemed clear to him that this was a delicate moment, for whatever reason, and he wanted to show Laurent that as long as Damen was pleasing him, then he himself was pleased.

So instead of taking Laurent in to the hilt, he instead pressed the flat of his tongue to the join where the head met the shaft. Laurent's hips bucked up toward his mouth, which Damen felt as a bolt of delight through his entire body, but when he exerted gentle pressure where his hands still held Laurent's thighs, Laurent stilled.

For the next couple minutes, Damen lavished the head of Laurent's cock with his tongue and his attention. Distantly, he wondered whether Laurent would ever summon his latent authority (and sense of superiority, Damen thought with some amusement) that was so present in his day-to-day attitude and tell him to get on with it, but he never did, and eventually Damen's own patience ran out. He wrapped his lips around the head, and this finally shook out of Laurent the loudest noise he had yet to make, though still quiet, in comparison to most.

Almost gleefully, Damen sank down, taking Laurent slowly and steadily into his mouth. He glanced up to see how Laurent was reacting, and found that he had removed his hands from the pillows overhead and instead fisted them into the blankets, where his fingers were held so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. Damen considered pulling away to tell him that he could touch, thread his fingers into Damen's hair. But that meant stopping, and finding language, and none of that seemed worth the effort.

He dipped down again, pulling Laurent into his mouth as deeply as he could, until the head of his cock hit Damen's throat and he paused for a long moment, letting it rest there. At the same time, Laurent seemed to stop breathing entirely, and for the span of several seconds, they were suspended there, paused in the middle of the scene, held aloft by one another and the tension of the moment.

And then Damen unfortunately had to breathe, and so he broke the sanctity of the pause to pull back enough that he could fill his lungs before taking Laurent all the way in once more.

With oxygen came inspiration, however, and this time when he pulled up, he pulled off of Laurent's cock entirely. Laurent did not show any sign of being upset about this, but then Damen moved even lower, to run his tongue back and behind Laurent's cock to press into the firm nub there. Above him, Laurent gasped audibly, a real gasp, at the sensation.

So Damen did it again, licking at it and pressing his tongue to it until his jaw hurt and he could feel wetness dripping down his chin. He might have been embarrassed by this, in other circumstances, but he was beyond embarrassment now.

He wouldn't have blamed Laurent for pressing down against him, or for touching himself, but he did neither. And so Damen felt free to change his own position. He sat back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and gently prompted Laurent to turn over via his hands on Laurent's hips.

Laurent hesitated for one second, maybe two, and then he flipped onto his front. Damen pressed his hands into the round firmness of Laurent's ass, spreading him open. Beneath his fingers, Laurent tensed again, prompting Damen to look up to his face once more, though now it was hidden, buried in his crossed arms.

"May I?" Damen asked again, not positive Laurent knew exactly what he intended, but confident he could intuit the general idea.

Laurent didn't answer right away, and Damen considered that he might really be thinking about whether he wanted to say yes, if he might deny him. Then, after what appeared to Damen to be a visible gathering of courage, Laurent said, "Yes," his voice solid and sure, or at the least bearing that tone.

Resolving to pay the closest attention to Laurent's reactions, just in case, Damen leaned in to brush his tongue softly over the tight ring of muscle. At the head of the bed, Laurent's breathing shuddered in his chest and throat, but he didn't bid Damen to stop. Damen kept his attentions gentle and exploratory through the first few strokes of his tongue, carefully gauging Laurent's reactions.

He had never had this done to him, and he'd only performed the act a handful of times, but from what he understood, it could be an overwhelming sensation, with the tongue both rough and soft, smooth and wet over the sensitive flesh.

This, in Laurent, translated itself into a brief, aborted sound from the chest and a minuscule spreading of his thighs. But Damen was coming to understand Laurent's reactions, and he saw this as both encouragement and acknowledgment of the effect he was having.

Accepting that Laurent was relaxing as much as he was likely to do, Damen allowed himself to show more enthusiasm. He administered a firm swipe of his tongue once, and again, and again, eventually losing himself in the heady power of it, only keeping enough of his attention on Laurent's reactions that he could stop if Laurent gave any indication of being uncomfortable. But he didn't, and Damen buried himself in his self-imposed task, riding the crest of his own arousal as he stroked at Laurent's hole with his tongue, his thumbs pressing hard into Laurent's flesh to hold him open and exposed.

Against the bed, Damen's own cock was hard, aching and leaking, and at some point his hips had started moving on their own, grinding him down against the soft bedding. At the top of his throat, the base of his tongue, he hurt with exertion, but it wasn't enough to make him stop, not when Laurent's hips canted up against his face, when he finally seemed to lose some little bit of his rigid control.

"Damen," he gasped, and Damen stopped, moving his face away, afraid Laurent wanted him to stop. Only when he did this, Laurent made a sound almost like a sob, and Damen understood that he had done the opposite of what Laurent wanted.

And so he leaned back in, pressing his tongue tight and close to the place where Laurent wanted it. The only indication that he had done right was that Laurent said nothing further, and that beneath Damen's hands, his thighs spread another inch apart, giving him more room, better access.

Damen was overcome with the desire to give Laurent anything and everything he could ask for, anything and everything he could ever want. If he had been enthusiastic before, he was devoted now. Beneath his ministrations Laurent had relaxed almost despite himself, the muscle losing its rigidity, opening to Damen's tongue. He took advantage, pressing his tongue in, feeling the muscle part for him, letting him in. It sent something ecstatic and thrillingly disarming shooting through him, a sort of formless pride, an artless excitement and joy.

For an instant, he thought he might come right there, rutting against the sheets with his tongue in Laurent's ass, except that at that exact moment, Laurent seized beneath him, every muscle from thigh to bicep tensing all at once. He pressed back solidly against Damen's face, despite hardly moving, and though he remained utterly silent, his body moved in an unconscious way that was no less graceful for all that it was uncontrolled.

Breathless and dizzy, Damen pulled away, using his hands on Laurent to again turn him over, so that he could see Laurent's front once more. But he hadn't come, as Damen had thought. He remained hard, and while he was leaking profusely, there were no telltale white stripes across his belly. And when Damen looked up at his face, he was met with a challenging glare.

"Is there a problem?" Laurent asked, his tone cold and not giving away even an ounce of insecurity, one perfect brow arched into perfect challenge.

Well, Damen had never been one to turn his back on a challenge.

"I don't have a problem," he said.

Evidently this was the right answer, or close enough to it. Damen remained down near Laurent's hips, weathering his glare, waiting Laurent out. And in a moment, Laurent spoke again. "You said you would do anything I asked," he said.

"Anything," Damen confirmed, wondering if Laurent was about to tell him to leave the room, to stay away from him.

But when Laurent spoke, his gaze remained heavy, and he said the words with deliberate precision, so there could be no mistaking them. "Fuck me."

The words sparked in Damen's mind and down through his body, landing in his cock, which he had been near-desperately trying to ignore. He knew his own eyes were wide and serious and maybe even dismayed, not because he hadn't thought this was where they were headed, but because hearing those words from Laurent's lips affected him more than he would have anticipated. If he had ever thought to anticipate such a thing before.

"Are you sure?" Damen said, not wanting Laurent to feel as though he owed him this. That wasn't how Damen felt about the matter at all. If Laurent had told him to leave, he would have done so, not happily, but at least willingly, and he would have held onto this night as a memory, fierce and livid in his head for the rest of his life.

"I'm not a child," Laurent said in a voice that, Damen thought, had been intended to be snappish, though it didn't quite come out that way. "I know what I want," he added, seeming to understand that his statement required clarification.

Damen nodded, serious and accepting. He had told Laurent he would give him anything he wanted, and he meant to follow through. But he couldn't, yet.

"Hold on," he said, before pushing himself up from the bed. Laurent followed him halfway up, even though he didn't know where Damen was going, propping himself onto his elbow in a gesture that was so sweetly innocent Damen didn't know what to do with himself over it. He didn't know what to make of it either, but the expression on Laurent's face was carefully guarded, and it tempered his amusement with concern. "I'll be right back," he promised.

Laurent regarded him for another moment with those wide, vulnerable eyes, and then he seemed to regain some of his arrogant insouciance, or at least he succeeded at throwing it back over himself like a robe, and he nodded.

Damen left the room and hurried down the hall to his own bedroom. He had to root through a few pairs of jeans to find what he was looking for -- he hadn't exactly come here expecting to sleep with his target, but this thought caused a twinge of guilt to unfurl in his belly and he shoved it aside for now. They had time, he told himself again. He could figure this out. In the meantime, it was as Laurent said: he knew what he wanted, and Damen knew he wanted. Why should it be any more complicated than that?

He took his spoils back across the hall and into Laurent's room. He found Laurent where he'd left him, carefully arranged into an arrogant, careless pose. It might have been legitimate, if it wasn't for the fact of Laurent's cock still painfully hard and leaking onto his stomach, the edge of wariness in Laurent's gaze as Damen re-entered the room with a condom and packet of lube.

At the sight of what he'd run off to retrieve, Laurent's composure broke. For a fraction of a second, Damen thought he was having some sort of breakdown, and then he realized that Laurent was laughing, silently, his hand pressed to his face to hide his smile.

Damen had never seen Laurent laugh outright before. He felt as though the entire cage of his chest were collapsing in on itself, the glimmer of emotion that had been stirring in him over the past hours, the past weeks, finally giving itself a shake and waking up at last.

"What?" he asked, willing to be the butt of Laurent's private joke if it meant getting to watch him loosen up in this way.

"Nothing," Laurent said. "You're just so," he paused, as though trying to land on the right words, "charmingly considerate."

Damen didn't really know why being considerate was so funny, but he wasn't going to press the matter. He dropped back onto the bed, and then, because he couldn't help himself, he kissed Laurent again. This time, the kiss was full of the languor of an extended period of sensual exchange. Laurent's tongue against Damen's was easy and hot as liquid fire.

"Say it again," Damen said when he pulled away. He held a finger under Laurent's chin and, cheekily, Laurent pulled himself out of Damen's loose grip.

"Fuck me," Laurent said again, meeting his eyes with a determined glare.

Damen laughed, and Laurent seemed both annoyed and turned on by it, which only amused Damen more. He climbed back onto the bed as Laurent rolled back onto his front.

Part of him wanted to put the condom on right then, to drive himself into Laurent's body as Laurent had driven himself relentlessly and fearlessly down the highway earlier that night. He felt sure that Laurent would be more than into it, if the easy way he had been kissing Damen was anything to go by, or the fact that he had told Damen twice now to fuck him, or the fact that Damen was intimately aware of how loose and open Laurent was for him already. 

But it seemed suddenly both more important, and infinitely more fun, to draw it out even further.

Ignoring both the condom and the packet of lube for the moment, Damen instead brushed the pad of his thumb over Laurent's hole, which seemed to be the sole part of him that had become completely free of tension. Damen dipped his thumb inside, just so, and carefully gauged Laurent's reaction, which was stunted, perhaps, but nevertheless enthusiastic as his breath caught and his hips tipped up and back.

Damen removed his hand for only a moment to tear open the packet of lube. He pressed some onto his fingers, leaving the rest in the foil. He touched one finger to Laurent where he was waiting. Not wanting to contradict what he had said he wanted, Damen nevertheless wanted to be sure Laurent hadn't changed his mind, or felt coerced in any way. He waited, watching what he could see of Laurent's face for any sign of reaction.

"If you do not," Laurent said, "put something inside me right now, I will not be held accountable for my next actions."

Damen laughed against the swell of Laurent's ass and pressed his first finger inside, past the ring of muscle that had been loosened already beneath his tongue. Laurent shivered, and Damen moved back up his body, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses to the base of his spine, where the muscle dimpled, the bottom of his rib cage, the hollow between his shoulder blades, as he went.

Swallowing against his own increasingly desperate arousal, Damen added a second finger beside the first. The stretch of muscle around his fingers made the inevitable progression of the moment impossible to ignore, and he felt his need pulse through him painfully.

"Laurent," he said, and it came out as an exhale, a fraction of the meaning he had intended to speak, a question and a request and a statement of desire all wrapped up into one succinct package.

But, despite his lack of clarity: "Yes," Laurent said. His hips pushed back against Damen's fingers. " _ Yes. _ "

And yet, it seemed wrong to do it now. Removed from his body, Damen would have kept this up indefinitely, gone on forever, just bringing Laurent closer and closer to the brink where he himself had been hovering for nearly an hour.

He pressed a third finger in along the other two, leaning his face into the hard valley between Laurent's shoulders. Some deep, impenetrable part of him wanted to bite and rend, not to force but merely to express his own dangerous, terrible power. He channeled it into his teeth and bit down hard on his own lip, pushing deeper with his fingers until he felt Laurent's body part around his knuckles.

He heard his own breathing in his ears, eclipsed only by the ragged push and pull of Laurent's.

Overcome and overwhelmed, Damen moved down and touched his tongue again to the place where his fingers disappeared inside Laurent's body. Laurent cried out then, for the first time, his arms clutching instinctively to the pillows where he had buried his head. Carried on some feral desire that seemed to exist well outside his own body, Damen flexed his fingers then, spreading them the fraction of a millimeter that he could against all of Laurent's body's natural defenses, his tongue flicking in between them.

" _ Damen _ ," Laurent said, in what might have been a snap in any other circumstance, if he didn't sound so out of his mind with desire.

And that was it: the limit Damen had been chasing since this whole thing started -- that, maybe, he had been chasing forever. Either way, he couldn't wait anymore. He removed his fingers as carefully as he could manage, tore open the wrapper on the condom and quickly slipped it onto himself.

Before he could line himself up, however, Laurent twisted his body so that he could meet Damen's eyes. He wrapped his lithe, elegant fingers around Damen's length, without tearing his gaze away from Damen's, as though checking the size of him by feel. Not sure what this meant or how to face it, Damen leaned into him and pressed a soft kiss to his lips, trying to communicate everything he couldn't say into that one, gentle touch.

Laurent met the kiss with open mouth, somehow giving and desperate all at once. He caught Damen's lip between his teeth, sharp and sparking, and Damen gasped into the kiss, which Laurent exploited with his tongue. When he pulled away, he remained disarmingly vulnerable, but he said, "Don't you dare stop now."

Damen could only imagine the look on his own face. When his hand found the curve where Laurent's neck met his shoulder, pressing him down into the mattress, it felt like worship. His cock found the soft place where Laurent was open and waiting for him with hardly any effort on his part, and then he was pressing, slow and slick, inside.

Laurent arched back against him, ass canting up to meet his hips, face pushed down into the pillows, the curve of his back graceful and enticing and painfully, painfully beautiful. Damen pressed his own face down into it, into the soft line of it, the sensation of Laurent closing tight around him too much to face head-on.

He had done this before, and yet it had never been like this. It never before had this quality of feeling both miraculous and inevitable, both soft and hard, both the easiest thing he had ever done, and the greatest challenge he had ever overcome.

It was every victory in the ring experienced at once, finding a new book laid out for him in early morning light, the fire in his blood as he’d watched Laurent urge his bike, with all the quiet power he possessed, ahead of his opponent’s.

Hardly daring to think about what he did, Damen twined his arms around Laurent, feeling his smooth skin against them, pulling Laurent's body tightly to his own. His hips worked, moving of their own accord in tight, tense thrusts. They couldn't have been closer, and yet it felt as though both their bodies strained to be just that, Damen's pressing in and Laurent's pushing back, driving each other toward their shared purpose.

At some point Laurent's hand found its way into Damen's hair, twining into his curls and holding tight. Damen was pressed so close to Laurent that he could barely move, but he was past caring, and it hardly seemed to matter. Sweat had sprung up along his spine, and he felt an answering dampness along the line where his body met Laurent's. They were rocking together in some rhythm that they knew inherently, no intellect required. And Damen felt himself cresting, breaching, but desperately he held back, keeping himself down below the surface of his pleasure.

He may not have known at all that Laurent finally did come, he remained so still and silent, if not for the sudden, hot stripes like sparks across his arms where they were like vices around Laurent's middle. Damen followed right after at the feel of it, the knowledge that he had led Laurent, finally, over that cliff's edge, pushing further, harder, deeper as he spilled.

They remained that way for a long moment after, lying close, Damen's arms wrapped tight around Laurent's chest, Laurent's fingers still woven into Damen's hair, breathing in a harmony that needed no words to be expressed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I worked so hard on this chapter in particular, and I really hope it was as fun and lovely to read as it was to write (except for the moments when writing it made me want to scream -- hopefully it was more enjoyable than that!).


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damen and Laurent finally confront DeVere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, thank you for being part of this community. The Captive Prince fandom has truly meant so much to me as I've navigated the crazy times we're currently living through. I can't express enough how much I love this story, these characters, and all of the people keeping them alive. And I hope this little fic of mine has given you something, whether that's comfort or an escape or just a bit of fun. I'm truly grateful for the opportunity to share it, it's been a labor of love.

The days passed in a disconcerting rush after Damen came to Laurent's bed. It was all Laurent could do to remain level and in control.

It had been difficult already, in some ways, even before anything had changed between them. Now he felt like he was juggling several concerns at once, while balancing on a tightrope suspended hundreds of feet over the city, and no net to catch him waiting beneath.

They had preparations to make before his uncle's gala event announcing the opening of his youth center. This was the moment Laurent had been waiting years for, and he could not afford to let it slip between his fingers. He would never have a stronger chance, to get all of his uncle's friends -- and enough of his enemies -- in one place together, to satisfactorily bring him down.

Nothing was going to get in the way of this. And, he had to admit, Damen had proven himself useful more than once. He had his own interest in seeing Laurent's uncle -- and no doubt all of DeVere Corp. -- fall. Perhaps this was not the way he would have gone about it, if things had been different, but he seemed willing enough to do it Laurent's way, at least for now, and Laurent had too much riding on this to press the issue. But although Damen had been a willing and capable partner in crime, so to speak, his presence had grown distracting.

Laurent could hardly go more than an hour, it seemed, without remembering Damen's hands on him: running lightly up his arms to press his wrists down into the pillows, spreading him open for Damen's tongue, wrapping tightly around him, holding Laurent so close that when it all finally became too much, when Laurent had finally come, he could scarcely move to rut against the mattress. 

These were dangerous thoughts.

Distracting thoughts. Laurent, who had never in his life had a hard time concentrating when it mattered, now found himself  _ daydreaming _ during meetings. It hadn't led to any serious blunders yet, but if he didn't regain strict control soon, it well might.

It was a good thing, therefore, that Damen would be leaving soon. He still thought Laurent didn't know. But Laurent did know. Of course he did. And when he thought about it, what did the ache in his chest, like a fist around all the soft parts of him, matter? Let it hurt. Let it remind him that what they were doing now was only pretending, and they both knew it, even if they would never discuss it.

Some days, Laurent felt as though this one remaining practical piece of himself was the only bastion left in his defense against Damen. Not that Damen was acting to hurt him. It was hard to imagine the man hurting a fly, he was so achingly, ridiculously gentle. But Damen wanted something from Laurent that Laurent couldn't give.

Help him, though -- he wanted to. He wanted to give everything. And in the small hours of the night, when Laurent returned from his meetings, and Damen had successfully accomplished whatever tasks Laurent had set for him (which Laurent did now, because he knew he could trust Damen to help things go off properly at the gala, if nothing else), Damen's wanting was an insatiable pool that Laurent's body desired nothing more than to feed.

Damen would catch him around the waist in the kitchen, set his mouth to Laurent's neck, and Laurent would be pliable and melting in his hands in moments. He would quickly and not very deftly open every button on Laurent's shirt, smoothing his massive hands beneath its edges to have it falling to the floor before Laurent even realized what he was up to. He would kneel at Laurent's feet, anywhere in the apartment, out of nowhere, as if it were the easiest and simplest thing in the world.

He met all of Laurent's reticence with calm, good-natured patience. Sometimes Laurent nearly cried with frustration, that someone like Damen had shown up at his door under such circumstances.

Not someone  _ like _ Damen. He could lie to Damen, because it was necessary. He could lie to his uncle, because the man deserved that and worse. But he could not lie to himself. He couldn't afford to. So, not someone like Damen, then. Damen, specifically. Damen, personally. Somehow, Laurent knew that there was no one else who could have affected him this way.

Sometimes Laurent gathered himself quickly enough to push Damen off of him, always with some excuse. He was tired, or he needed Damen for something else, or they had to go over the plan again.

Damen was never insulted by this, and he never argued. He would go along with whatever Laurent asked of him and not say a word about it. He seemed to understand innately that it wasn't that Laurent didn't want him, only that Laurent wanted him too much. He didn't know what to do with all of the wanting, and it scared him. Damen seemed to understand this too, and he never pushed or pressed for anything.

But there were times when Laurent's control abandoned him completely. In these moments, he did his best to hold onto himself, to channel the fire in his blood into words rather than actions. He would snap and prod with barbed-wire tongue, but it didn't do any good. Damen knew what he was up to, and he would merely regard Laurent with that softly amused expression -- or with the heat that came when Laurent managed to really nick him -- and none of it would matter anyway.

There were times when Laurent's body betrayed him too thoroughly for him to fight himself back from the edge. Once, he had been moving through the kitchen to set a coffee cup into the sink when Damen had reached out for him and caught the cuff of his sleeve between his fingers.

He'd brushed the pad of his thumb over the soft underbelly of Laurent's wrist, and he had been lost. He'd nearly shattered the cup, and in a moment, it seemed, Damen had him pressed back against the island, bent and begging.

So it was for the best that Damen would be leaving soon. And if it caused Laurent pain when he went, so much the better. He deserved it, for allowing this to happen in the first place.

In this way, the days passed, a mix of hurried planning and languorous, luxurious time in bed, or its functional equivalent anywhere in the apartment, if Damen had his way (which, somehow, he always seemed to do).

The gala was being hosted on the other side of town, in a building close to the one they'd broken into together. Laurent was only on the list of invited guests because it would have looked bad for his uncle to exclude him -- the company was meant to be his, after all, in just a few weeks -- and because he hadn't felt especially compelled to try, when Laurent never showed up to these events.

In fact, Laurent had spent most of the past few years painstakingly avoiding galas and press conferences and anything where he would be on display to photographers and gossip columnists.

This had served him doubly: it kept him out of the news, which allowed him to move more freely through the city, and it gave him the chance to work behind the scenes when his uncle was distracted. 

However, it also suited his uncle. It allowed him to control the public image, and public opinion, of DeVere Corp. It kept Laurent out of the way, at least publicly. No doubt he believed he would be able to slowly erode Laurent's favor with the shareholders and the city in general, and Laurent was sure he had every confidence that he could leverage this against Laurent when the time came to oust him. But that didn't mean Laurent had to make it easy for him.

The event was black tie, and Laurent was just fastening his second cufflink when Damen's bedroom door opened and he looked up. Somehow the formal attire made Damen look even bigger than usual, alternately broad and tapered in all the right places. Commanding and lovely and, Laurent allowed himself to admit privately, quite beautiful.

"Adequate," he said out loud.

Damen shook his head and looked down at himself. "I feel ridiculous," he said. 

"And me?" Laurent asked, raising what he hoped was a caustic eyebrow, and rather fearing it had come off flirtatious instead.

"You look perfect," Damen said. "You always look perfect. You could dress yourself in a paper bag and have half the city falling at your feet."

"Only half?"

Damen moved closer, slowly, his eyes dragging over Laurent's body in a way that felt as solid as his hands. "The other half would have turned their eyes from your brilliance," he said, his voice warm with amusement, indulging in Laurent's games as always. He reached Laurent then, and lifted his hands to cup Laurent's face.

Something small and deeply buried in Laurent hurt like a bruise, a wound reopened. He pressed his eyes tightly closed and felt his lungs stop for a long, painful beat of his heart. Everything inside him, from his blood to his bones, wanted to allow Damen's lips to touch his. But this would all be over after tonight, and their plan needed to work perfectly, or it would all have been in vain. Damen was not, of course, going to make this easy. All the more reason for Laurent to plunge in the knife now, quickly, for both of them.

"You have me quite turned around," Laurent said.

Damen laughed in a way that was not quite a laugh, not quite a breath, and he leaned further in, less than an inch now from Laurent's lips. If he was allowed to kiss him now, Laurent felt he would be utterly derailed.

"Akielos must have known what they were doing when they sent you to me."

His statement had the desired effect. Damen staggered back from him immediately, his eyes wide and shocked, though otherwise devoid of emotion, for the moment. 

There was a long interval of silence, during which time Laurent tried to compose himself. He took measured breaths, made sure that his own face remained impassive and empty even as Damen's morphed before his eyes into a show of changing feeling: shock, pain, disappointment, maybe even a hint of anger and frustration. Guilt.

This, finally, was where he landed. "How long have you known?" he asked.

"Did you think," Laurent said, making sure to inject his voice with every shard of ice he could find in himself, "that I wouldn't recognize the leader of one of the primary threats against my own company?"

He watched the impact of these words on Damen, and then watched his resolve impose itself over him. "You've known the whole time," he said.

Laurent took a second, two, to make sure every piece of himself -- the way he held his body, his face, his voice -- was strapped properly into place. "I've known the whole time."

For a moment, he allowed Damen to process this revelation. He couldn't predict Damen. He didn't know exactly where his mind would go with the information. He had a few ideas, but Damen could have fallen into any one of them. Perhaps he had truly been pretending all along, operating with a coldness that Laurent had a hard time attributing to him. Perhaps he was a better operative than Laurent had given him credit for. He had certainly succeeded in infiltrating his target, in more ways than one. But the pain this caused Laurent was real and sharp. He wanted so desperately for it not to be true that he couldn't let the moment lie.

"I'm sure they'll be pleased to receive your report," Laurent said. "No one can say now that you didn't do your best to fuck DeVere Corp., after you bent its heir over every surface of his own apartment."

Damen made a sound like he had just been punched in the gut, though Laurent had seen exactly that happen, and he hadn’t made such a sound then. "Laurent," he said.

But Laurent knew enough to know that you didn't back off when you had your opponent where you wanted them. To win, you had to press your advantage. "I hope it was a worthwhile sacrifice for you, choking on my cock. I wonder, was it your plan all along to blind me with the talents of your tongue, or did you simply take the chance when it presented itself?"

Now Damen looked truly horrified, and he took what appeared to be an involuntary step back, away from Laurent, away from the vitriol and the truth of it laid out. Time, then, to twist the knife.

"Unfortunately for both of us, this changes nothing. My uncle still presents the largest problem for each of our concerns, and we still need each other through the end of the night. After that, if we pull this off, you leave. Go back to Akielos with the information you've gained. Perhaps we'll face each other again someday."

Damen looked stricken. He still hadn't said a word other than Laurent's name. Laurent didn't know whether it was guilt or shame or merely shock that held his tongue, but something violent and cruel lashed in him, and he found that he didn't want, for once, to rein it in. 

"What, exactly, did you expect? Did you think you could go on lying indefinitely? That you would be able to play off to your organization that you needed more time, that you had almost everything you needed to bring me down, you would return to them soon -- all the while fucking me into senselessness? Did you think you could use me to warm your cock whenever you liked and I wouldn't notice? I'm not as innocent as you think, Damen."

This, finally, shook Damen's language loose. His expression was complicated as he said, "I've never thought you were innocent, Laurent."

The words brought Laurent up short. A multitude of meanings in those words, and Laurent knew Damen probably meant a fair few of them. It didn't calm him any to hear it, but it did leash the fury inside him once more. "No," he agreed. And then he returned to his cufflinks, finishing them off, feeling Damen's attention on them, on the wrists beneath.

It seemed that the argument, such as it was, had burnt itself out. Better to have it out here and now. Better to go into the gala without the lie, hanging over them, that they might still have -- whatever it was that they'd had -- tomorrow.

With his uncle out of the way, Laurent would be free to take over DeVere Corp. Once he did that, he would be Damen's enemy. The enemy of Akielos. Damen had to come to this understanding eventually. Better for both of them that it be now, to save them from the mess of trying to end it after the fact.

Damen followed Laurent down to the car silently, and they sat silently beside each other in the seat. Laurent pretended he wasn't aware of Damen next to him through the whole drive, instead running through every aspect of the plan, again and again, turning it over, examining every angle for anything he might have missed, anything that might require an additional contingency.

He did not think about Damen's hands, how hot and rough they were in texture, but how softly they held him. He did not think about how his own heart seemed to pulse and stutter along with the rhythm of Damen's hips as he pressed somehow both carefully and relentlessly into Laurent's body, as though he were precious and valuable and impossible to resist all at once. He did not think about how Damen looked at him, in the cool blue hours of the late night or early morning, with the same joyfully mystified look on his face with which he'd regarded the stars outside the city.

And then they were drawing up to the building, and it was time to face his uncle.

#

Damen's mind hadn't stopped reeling from the moment Laurent told him that he knew who he was, through the long and painful string of caustic words, or through the long and painful drive to the gala.

He tried to manage his own face, didn't want anyone to look at them together and get the sense that some drama lay beneath their carefully constructed surface. Laurent, of course, was immaculate in his tux. He looked cold, aloof, and uncaring, but that was how he always looked, at least in public. Damen knew he probably still looked miserable, even angry, but he must have been holding it back enough -- he had no doubt that Laurent would tell him to pull himself together if he thought anyone else would notice.

He was angry. He knew he didn't have any right to be. Everything Laurent had said was technically true. But it hurt to hear, as Laurent had known it would -- as Laurent had meant for it to. And it hurt him, also, to think that Laurent would believe of him the manipulation for which he'd been accused.

Yes, Damen had slept with him, under the false pretenses of his cover, believing Laurent didn't know who he truly was. And that had been wrong. But it had not been Damen's plan all along. It had never been Damen's plan. Certainly he had never meant to use it to manipulate Laurent into giving himself away, and anything he might have discovered that could have been useful to Akielos, through his changed relationship with Laurent, he would never have sold to them.

Even as he thought this, though, he heard the ring of untruth in it. How could he have extricated usable knowledge from what it would have been unfair to divulge? He had been spying, all along -- he had been there, living with Laurent, not just as Damen, but as Damen, leader of Akielos, and that necessarily relegated everything he had done into the category of subterfuge, whether he liked it or not.

Guilt and shame churned in his belly. He had deceived himself, in more ways than one, and Laurent had been the one to suffer the casualties. There was a time, not long ago, when that thought wouldn't have bothered him. Now it made him sick.

But he would get through this night. It was good and right to bring down DeVere, and it would help Laurent too. Damen would do this for him, put his own feelings aside, follow the plan they had crafted together.

And if, in the back of his mind, there was some small part of him that rejoiced, that swelled with pride and happiness at the knowledge that Laurent had known all along who he truly was, and had given himself to Damen anyway, despite everything, he pushed it out of his mind, because he owed that to Laurent, at least.

Laurent seemed to know where to go and what to do once they arrived. He left his car with a valet, and he and Damen both stepped out into the night. The air had taken on a soft edge of humidity as summer drew nearer, though the sun had been set for long enough that the evening was cool. Laurent led the way up the steps of the building, lavishly decorated for Delpha, a relic of another time.

DeVere had hosted his event in the old museum, which housed art and artifacts from the Old Empire. Damen was sure Laurent had theories on why his uncle had chosen this particular place. But it could just as easily have been that the place was pretty, because it certainly was beautiful in a way that most buildings in the city no longer had any use for.

Even outside, the facade was intricate and touched with gold here and there, a frivolous display that looked out of place surrounded by steel and glass. Inside, as Laurent led them up the front steps and through the beckoning doors, was a vista of white marble that glowed with the warm yellow light spilling through every open door and down from chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

He half expected Laurent to tell him not to stare, he was making it too obvious that he'd never been anywhere like this. But then, most people hadn't.

Laurent, however, was not being taken in by the splendid opulence of the setting. He was scanning the crowd, which was a far cry from the press of bodies in the basement of the ring, but still sizable. Damen tried to follow in his footsteps, to search for DeVere among the milling gowns and penguin suits, but as soon as he glanced at Laurent, his gaze stuck there, like a fly in honey.

Damen should have known that Laurent would look even more beautiful in a place like this, all warm light and golden fixtures. It turned his coloring from lovely and fine to sumptuous and exquisite. On a given day, Laurent was a marble statue. In here, he was burnished gold. Damen felt his mouth go dry just looking at him, and the desire to reach out to him, to brush his fingers over the soft, firm skin, was so overwhelming as to nearly overpower him.

That they could live here, in this time and this place, but be unable to touch each other seemed the worst sort of failure. What did the city outside these walls matter, Damen found himself wondering, in comparison to this?

That he could not have his city and Laurent both was an impenetrable fact, but he couldn’t help attacking it again and again in his mind. It was something he couldn't seem to think his way out of, something he desperately wanted to pretend didn't matter.

He wouldn't presume to know whether Laurent felt the same. He doubted it. But certainly there was something between them, even Laurent could not have denied that. Not after the last week they’d spent together. Not after Damen had brought a flush to his face countless times. Not after Damen had spent every moment he could inside him, after feeling Laurent shudder and clench and cling around him. Not after one late night when they hadn't made it further than the floor of the living room, lying on the plush carpet, when Laurent had breathed out a single word, " _ Please _ ," and Damen had made him come with nothing but his tongue.

It wasn't just the sex. The ease that had been growing between them since the night they'd broken into Guion's office had taken on a new quality. Damen didn't know if it had been the fight, or the race, or their first night in bed together, though he suspected that really, it was a mix of all of it. But there had come to be something akin to friendship between them, and while it was still tender and new, Damen felt fiercely protective of it.

For Damen, at least, the sex had been an expression of that growing feeling. He suspected Laurent knew that. Maybe that was why it hurt so badly to have it all thrown back at him. He had kept his identity hidden. That didn't negate how he felt -- he knew it didn't, because he felt it anyway, even knowing he shouldn't. But did it diminish the value of his feeling? Maybe it did. But then, didn't Laurent's plans to take over for his uncle, to go on heading a regime that treated people in evil ways, diminish his?

He tried to tell himself that Laurent had done him a favor, by throwing it all out into the open, as cold and clinical as a body on the slab for autopsy. Nik certainly would have said so. But Damen couldn't feel it.

"There he is," Laurent said from where he stood at Damen's right. He wasn't pointing, but Damen followed his line of sight, and saw the man he'd always known from television and reputation as Mr. DeVere.

Nothing about the man stood out in particular -- at least, nothing that could have been pointed out or or quantified. He was average in most ways: stature, build, appearance. Damen had heard snatches of his speech before, and had never found anything especially compelling about his voice.

He was handsome enough, but in a boring sort of way. There was nothing interesting about his features, even if also there was nothing outwardly offensive about him. But despite all of this, he had a commanding presence. He knew people, that much was obvious from listening to him speak for no more than a minute. He knew what people wanted to see, what they wanted to hear, and he knew how to use those things to bend them to his will.

In his younger days, before Akielos had helped him to see the evils of corporations like DeVere Corp., and of those who led and controlled them, Damen had been as taken in by him as anyone. DeVere knew the right things to leave in the dark, and which to pull into the light, in order to seem not just competent, but caring. Damen did not envy Laurent having the man for family, let alone an enemy.

He hadn't spotted them yet, as far as Damen could tell. He had gone on speaking with a handful of men Damen didn't recognize. Though there were many women in the room -- in equal number to the men, if Damen had to guess -- DeVere didn't have any around him for a ten foot radius. It was impossible to tell whether this was because he had banished them somehow, or if they were avoiding him.

"Maybe it's better if he doesn't know we're here," Damen said.

But Laurent shook his head. "He knows," he said, certain and unwavering, despite the fact that Damen could see, for just a second, his pulse fluttering beneath the collar of his crisp white shirt. Damen didn't doubt him. DeVere didn't seem the type to miss anything. He probably had someone come to tell him as soon as Laurent pulled up to the curb outside.

"I need to speak with Torveld," Laurent said, still speaking quiet and close so they would be less likely to be overheard. He steered Damen away from DeVere to instead look through one of the other rooms.

Only the front of the first floor of the museum had been opened for the event. Damen estimated that there were about a hundred and fifty people there total, milling around the three open rooms, which included the large hall they had first stepped into. DeVere was hovering in the doorway to the room on the right, so Laurent now led them through the door on the left.

All three rooms looked much the same to Damen: gilded and excessive, in a celebratory sort of way. Just like the people inside them -- like himself too, dressed as he was. He hadn't been lying to Laurent though: he did look perfect. The sharp, tight lines of the tux accentuated his well-made body, highlighting his broad shoulders and tapered waist, hinting at the strength of his thighs. Amidst the glamour of the rooms, Damen found it all too easy to allow Laurent to draw his eye, and for a few moments, he only looked at him, admiring and pretending that their time together wasn't fast drawing to its close.

It hadn't been his intention to leave so soon. Akielos would have wanted him to stay on with Laurent, to continue spying.

He didn't know whether he could have done that. Not the way they would have wanted him to, the way Nik and Kastor would have wanted him to. It would have meant sacrificing whatever this thing was, between him and Laurent, and with every minute that passed, Damen was another minute deeper in. He didn't think he could have done it.

He had resolved to tell Laurent the truth, after tonight, when they had cleared this first hurdle, when they would have the time to figure things out, to talk about it. When they would have the time for Damen to tell Laurent how he felt.

But Laurent had already known the truth. And after tonight, he would have no use for Damen anymore. After tonight, he would send him away, because it was the only logical thing to do to protect himself.

Beside him, Laurent snatched two shimmering flutes of champagne from a tray held by a waiter who was walking by. Damen recognized the man, but neither of them gave any indication that they knew each other, or had ever seen one another before. Laurent handed one of the flutes to Damen, who immediately sipped at it, hoping it would help to calm his racing blood. Laurent didn't drink, as Damen had never seen him drink, but merely held onto his. It was a prop, to help him look the part, and nothing more.

In the three seconds Damen was distracted, Laurent slunk away from him. He slipped quickly and easily through the crowd. Damen hurried to follow, but it was harder for him to move around the ballgowns and the waiters carrying their trays. Even Laurent's bright head was harder to keep track of in this room full of gold.

By the time Damen did manage to catch up, Laurent had found his mark and plastered himself to his side. Damen hung back, now that he had Laurent in his line of sight again. He didn't like the idea of leaving Laurent alone here in this snake pit, though he would have to soon enough. But he didn't want to get in Laurent's way either.

So he stood back a few feet, lingering near one of the tables opulently decked out with more food than all of these people were likely to eat combined, and watched Laurent lean in close to Torveld to speak into his ear. Torveld laughed, and color showed on his cheeks, though whether this had been caused by Laurent's words or the champagne in his hand, Damen couldn't tell from here.

Watching the two of them standing closely together in that way caused something complicated to happen in Damen's chest. Jealousy at their proximity, maybe, but it was more than that too.

What might things have been like, between Laurent and himself, if they had met each other under different circumstances? If Damen had been born into this glittering world of wealth and easy power? Or if Laurent had been born into his world -- a thought which sparked and caught fire as soon as Damen thought it.

What might Laurent have become if he had been free from his uncle's influence, at least in such a high-stakes reality? If his brother had never died? He would have the same intelligence, but it might have been put to different use. He and Damen would have known each other, he felt sure about that. For someone like Laurent to exist in the same spheres as himself without Damen ever seeing him would have been impossible.

For a long, painful moment, Damen allowed himself to imagine that life. Free of backstabbing and politics and a long history of evil deeds, things would have been so simple -- or at least far simpler than they were now. Maybe they would even have worked in Akielos together, fighting and working side-by-side to bring about a better world. It seemed so impossibly unfair, unjust, that this future should be barred from them, for no reason other than Laurent's birth, the circumstances of where he had grown up, and who had raised him.

As he thought these things, he looked up again to find Laurent watching him now, though he was still in conversation with Torveld. The older man seemed not to have noticed that he longer had Laurent's undivided attention.

Laurent stood with his body turned toward Torveld, but he kept his head at such an angle that he could easily glance from Torveld to Damen, and for several seconds, he merely looked into Damen's eyes from across the room.

Despite the severity of his clothing, the light of the room made him look soft. He was a man of such contradictions, in all things. How he spoke with ease about bedroom activities, but when it came to actually performing them, he was innocent and sweet, and he liked always to move slowly and gently. How he fought so hard against his uncle, to make sure he could secure his inheritance, but seemed less than interested in what DeVere Corp. had accomplished -- because, in a sick sort of way, they had accomplished great things since Laurent's father's time -- or the ways that he could push it further once he took the reins.

In a way he couldn't quite lace together, these two facts began to coalesce in Damen's mind, and he had an intuitive understanding that they were related somehow.

It occurred to him that he had never seen Laurent behave in the ways he had come, over the years, to expect from Delpha's upper class. In his line of work, Damen had come head-to-head with plenty of people who truly believed that the corporations taking over the city were in the right, or at least within their rights to do so. It was a mentality that came down to a lack of belief in right and wrong, only in power. Power and weakness. But that didn't seem to fit at all with what Damen had come to learn of Laurent.

He could, of course, be caustic, even cruel. But only ever in a personal way. There was a distinction there that Damen understood now, one that mattered, and it gave Damen a glimmer of hope even as Laurent, across the room, finally broke eye contact and turned fully back to Torveld.

He spoke with Torveld for another moment, and then delicately extracted himself. He managed to get out of the interaction without touching Torveld at all, even though a hand on his arm, or even a handshake, would have been appropriate. Torveld didn't seem to notice, though Damen doubted he would have minded having Laurent touch him in any context.

Laurent made his way silkily back to Damen through the milling crowd, slinking between gem-like gowns like it was the easiest thing in the world to navigate the treacherous social landscape. Damen noticed that some people seemed pleased to see him, and while Laurent didn't bend over backwards to greet any of these people, he nodded to them or otherwise acknowledged them in ways that were just on the correct side of polite.

Other people avoided him entirely, or even made faces at his approach, seemingly without a care for whether or not he saw them. Of course, Laurent never reacted to this. Still others didn't appear to recognize him at all. The effect was that he had the impression of being utterly alone in this massive room full of swarming color, a sole stark figure surrounded by glitter and opulence.

And then he had reached Damen, and while the tension still hung around his shoulders, he relaxed infinitesimally, so small a change that a few weeks ago, Damen would never have noticed it.

So then, he thought to himself, despite his words from the apartment earlier that night, Laurent was still more comfortable around Damen than anyone else in this room.

"Torveld is still with us," Laurent told him, as though there had ever been any doubt.

And then Damen realized that for Laurent, there had been. How often had his plans been torn out from under his feet by his uncle? How often had Laurent had to rely on contingencies built on contingencies, just to keep up?

Laurent was watching him again, his face carefully arranged to display only cool indifference, but a heavy attention nevertheless present in the way his eyes lingered on Damen's face. "Laurent--" Damen said, not sure exactly what he meant to say, but sure suddenly that he could say it and be heard. Only Laurent didn't let him say anything further.

"You need to fetch Govart," he said, cutting Damen off. "My uncle will be speaking soon."

#

Damen stopped by the coat room on his way out of the museum. He doubted many people had worn overcoats, but hoped enough had that he could snatch one that would fit him decently. He didn't need it, but he thought it might help him to convince Govart to come along if he wasn't obviously wearing a tux.

The coat room was only sparsely filled, but as a result, the attendant wasn't paying much attention to his charge. Damen found him flirting with one of the waiters and managed to sneak by without attracting their notice. He found the largest coat in the place and shrugged into it before going back out into the main hall. Before he slipped out into the night, he looked back over his shoulder, trying to catch another glimpse of Laurent, out of curiosity and a strange sense of unease. He didn't like leaving him alone in there with his uncle. But he couldn't see him.

"Shall I fetch your car, sir?" the valet asked as Damen descended the steps outside.

"No, thank you," Damen said. "I'm just going for a walk to get some air."

Maybe he'd said too much. The valet looked a little startled, but he let Damen go without another word. Strange what power the circumstances of a man's location, and the clothes on his back, could wield over people.

Damen knew where to go because he knew the whole city, even the parts like this where he had never lived. He'd been with Akielos for several years, and his work with them had taken him everywhere within Delpha's borders.

Laurent had told Govart to meet Damen at an address nearby -- far enough that he shouldn't suspect where he was really being taken, until it was too late. Damen still wasn't entirely sure what Laurent hoped to get out of Govart. Maybe it was less about convincing Govart to speak, and more about putting this particular pressure on DeVere.

He didn't love the idea, but Damen had agreed to help Laurent, and he would do what he could. And then, maybe, after they got through this -- maybe then he could talk to Laurent about the ideas that had been brewing in his head all night. Ideas about a way forward, maybe, for them. For both of them.

Damen found Govart where he had been told to wait, lingering in an alley in a part of town that belonged fully to neither the upper city nor the lower, hovering just at the edge of light from a street lamp.

Govart saw Damen and recognized him. He stepped into the pool of light from the lamp with a sneer. "The brat finally spread his legs for someone and it was a barbarian," Govart said, by way of greeting. "Should have guessed he'd only open his legs for an animal like you. He always has had filthy taste."

Damen's stomach jolted at the language, the idea behind it. Laurent's friends at the race had spoken similarly -- even Laurent himself spoke this way -- though there was a particularly disgusting tint to it coming from Govart, who repulsed Damen in a way few people ever had, in his gut. Did everyone in the upper city speak like this, he wondered? Maybe it gave them the feeling of playing in the dirt that they otherwise scorned.

The implication that Govart somehow deserved to be in the place he assumed Damen occupied with Laurent, the idea of him ever being there, made Damen sick to his stomach, and he didn't try to keep this from his face. But Govart only laughed at him. He would kill this man with his bare hands before he let him touch Laurent. He let that show on his face too.

Govart leered, and Damen found himself wishing he really was going to be fighting him again tonight. It would have felt good to blow off steam, and to teach Govart a lesson. But Laurent needed him, and Damen had sworn to himself that he would follow Laurent's plan.

"This way," he said to Govart, and luckily Govart followed after him.

It only took a few minutes to get back to the museum, but this time Damen didn't go up the front steps. He couldn't risk anyone seeing Govart and reporting his presence to DeVere. Whatever Laurent's plan for Govart, it would be best to take DeVere by surprise wherever possible. So instead, Damen brought him around to the back, where he knocked twice at the kitchen door.

The door swung open quickly. Govart had gone along with all of this easily enough, and when Damen saw Nik in the open doorway, and told Nik to bring Govart into a spare room to wait, Govart went along with him.

Damen had contacted Akielos and told several of them to be here tonight, positioning them in various places around the event, as a sort of fail-safe. Laurent hadn't liked the idea, but as Damen didn't like most of the plan that had come from Laurent's mind, he pointed out that as they were working together on this, concessions would have to be made on both sides.

"I prefer to think my way through conflict," Laurent had said, his gaze icy in contrast to the low, easy warmth of his voice.

They had been in bed at the time, tangled in Laurent's soft sheets. Not pressed together in post-coital laziness, because Laurent didn't seem to do that (a quiet thrill at the thought that Damen may yet have time to coax him into it, if he could get Laurent to listen to him later tonight, after they got through this), but rocking their hips together in a slow, building roll of pleasure that seemed like it might crest at any moment, or never.

In the end, Laurent had agreed that Damen could place a few people around the event, if he could get them in. In retrospect, Laurent had known all the time exactly who Damen meant to use, had known that Damen was talking about bringing Akielos into the very heart of the DeVere Corp. universe. The fact that he had allowed this anyway, rather than finding some way to fight himself out of it, was a testament to just how much he had riding on their success here tonight.

With Govart dispatched, Damen went back into the party, sneaking up through the kitchen with a quick nod of thanks to Nik -- for taking care of Govart, for being here, for going along with Damen's crazy schemes. He dropped off the stolen overcoat back in the coat room and then set himself to the task of finding Laurent.

Even amidst all of these people, he wasn't difficult to find. He stood out in any company. Damen slunk to his side, in the room where they had first seen DeVere, though he seemed to have moved on by then.

"He's here," Damen said quietly.

Laurent didn't startle, just turned to face him, another full glass of champagne perched sweetly between his fingers. Or maybe it was the same glass, it was impossible to tell. Laurent nodded but otherwise didn't speak.

"I don't understand," Damen said. "How are you going to get him to say what we need him to say?"

At this, Laurent turned and faced him fully, his gaze stark, his expression frank, as though he were discussing the weather. "I'm going to offer him something he's always wanted," Laurent said. A throwaway line, like it meant nothing.

He kept his eyes on Damen through the long seconds it took for him to process Laurent's words, and the words Govart had thrown at him beneath the street lamp not half an hour ago. And then Damen felt his stomach plummet, as though he had fallen from the roof of Laurent's penthouse apartment. He couldn't mean -- not --

"You can't," he said, meaning to go on, but finding himself unable to.

Laurent arched his eyebrow, and his voice had somehow gone even colder when he said, "Can't I?"

Damen felt as though he had been punched. Breath would not come easily into his lungs, and he found himself upset, angry but also frightened and sad in a way that he couldn't have explained because he didn't understand it himself. There was no doubt in his mind that Laurent did not want to do what he was proposing, and no doubt either that he absolutely would do it, if he thought he had to in order to win this fight.

This night was the opportunity Laurent had been waiting years for. This face-off with his uncle was what he had been preparing for since long before Damen had met him. He was able to put aside Damen's allegiances, his position within an organization bent on bringing down everything Laurent had been fighting for, to make this work. If he could do that, then he could do this. Damen thought he might really be sick then.

"Oh, calm down," Laurent said. "Hopefully it won't come to that. It's not something I relish doing, I can assure you. But I'll make the offer, if it will keep him here long enough to use." A split second, and then: "Like you."

And with that, Laurent twisted away, knowing exactly how deeply he'd plunged the knife into Damen's chest, having calculated it to an exact degree: just enough to cause the maximum amount of pain, without driving Damen to break his word and ruin Laurent's plans.

It was effective, as everything Laurent did was effective. He was as talented with his words as he was on his bike, his tongue as sharp as his gaze. Damen had to lean against a table to catch his breath from the minute-long conversation, his head reeling with all of it: the offer Laurent planned to make to Govart to keep him in line, the idea that he had only slept with Damen for the same purpose. He had known, after all, all along -- who Damen really was, what he was really doing at Laurent's apartment. He had never believed that Damen was only there to be his "assistant."

But no, Damen told himself. Even Laurent couldn't have faked what Damen had seen in him. The wide-eyed vulnerability, the confused eagerness, the desire rampant in his body even as Laurent had seemed to want Damen to lead him in action. 

It wasn’t exactly as though Damen had put one foot out the door either. There would have been no reason for Laurent to give himself to Damen just to keep him there. There had never been any danger of Damen leaving. Certainly not after they had broken into Guion's office together, after they were united in their hatred of DeVere, their mutual desire to tear him from his seat of power.

It had been a lie. A carefully held lie, perhaps a lie Laurent had been telling himself. Laurent may have hated that he'd given himself to Damen freely, that he had known all along who Damen was, but he had done so.

From the pain and the confusion swirling like a storm cloud in his head, Damen suddenly felt a light-headed delight rush through him. For the first time, he realized, he was fully convinced that Laurent had truly wanted him, had wanted him so much that it had overpowered everything within him that urged him to be cautious and hold himself at bay. So much that it had beaten the fact that Damen was Akielos.

And the fact that Laurent was trying so hard to push him away now seemed to support that theory too. Maybe he thought it would be easier that way, if he hurt Damen badly enough that he would want to leave tomorrow. 

Damen drew a deep breath in, trying to steady himself. The room smelled like food Damen didn't recognize and flowers that must have come from some greenhouse in the city somewhere, or else they had been imported from another place entirely. That too sent hope singing through Damen.

He had spent his entire life in this city, but there was a whole world beyond these borders where he and Laurent could make their own way, if they wanted to. There were ways for them, paths that they could take, roads that they could forge together.

Before Damen could push away from the table and go off in search of Laurent again, however, he saw a familiar face coming toward him through the crowd. He looked even more striking in the context of this brilliant room than he had around the campfire outside the city limits, leaning against Laurent's motorcycle or waving a dainty kerchief over the night street.

Nicaise stalked toward Damen now with the same confidence he had possessed that night. Eerie, almost, to see that sort of self-assured conviction on a child. Such an adult countenance. It made him appear intelligent and precocious, yes, but also something a little less savory too, like he had been forced to bear too much too early in his life. It made Damen feel sympathy for him without even really knowing why, and this, he suspected, would not do him any favors with Nicaise, who would only sniff out the weakness and exploit it. Not unlike Laurent, Damen realized.

"It's you again," Nicaise said as he arrived to stand in front of Damen. His bearing and his manner were so at odds with his face and the rest of him that Damen had a hard time guessing his age, though he couldn't have been much older than fourteen.

"It's me," Damen agreed, trying and failing to keep his amusement out of his voice and face.

Nicaise narrowed his eyes. "Where is Laurent?" he asked, putting on an even haughtier tone than the one he usually used. He was wearing a little suit that fit him so well it had to have been custom-made. He wore a sapphire earring in one ear that seemed almost out of place in this setting. But no, it wasn't that it seemed out of place, Damen realized, but rather that it seemed entirely too grown up for this boy to wear. It struck him as uncomfortable, and in fact it was the only article Nicaise wore that didn't seem to fit his size at all.

The jewelry Laurent had traded for Nicaise to bring the bike to him the night he raced Torveld, Damen felt sure of it.

"He's gone to," he began, only stumbling for a moment when he said, "speak with someone. He'll be back soon." He hoped.

"Who?" Nicaise asked with narrowed eyes.

Damen considered, and figured it couldn't hurt to tell Nicaise the truth. He didn't know how Laurent knew Nicaise, or how likely it was that Nicaise knew Govart. But it could be useful to Damen if he did, and he didn't think it would harm Laurent's plans any.

"A man named Govart," Damen said.

Immediately the color drained from Nicaise's face, and for a full three seconds he said nothing at all. In fact, he looked panicked, his blue eyes gone wide in his face, making him look even younger than he already had. Damen didn't know how to react to this, but he felt it bring back an edge of his own panic all over again, thinking of Laurent alone in a room with Govart.

He had been foolish to let Laurent go alone -- he never should have done it. That, of course, Laurent had known. It was the reason he'd thrown that last barb over his shoulder at Damen just before he'd gone. To make sure Damen didn't go after him and stop him from following through on his plan.

Damen could have kicked himself.

"Nicaise," he said, "what do you know about Govart?" What was Nicaise doing here, for that matter? It occurred to him that he hadn't seen anyone else here who he recognized from that night at Laurent's race. The only people here from that night, aside from Laurent and himself, were Nicaise and Govart. And now he found out that they knew each other.

How had he not seen and understood it before? It would explain how Laurent knew Nicaise, and why Nicaise had access to a bike that Laurent knew and loved as though it were his own. Why they traded trinkets like that earring currently smirking at Damen in the golden light. In what was becoming a common occurrence for the evening, Damen's stomach turned.

"Nicaise," he said again, because Nicaise had not answered his last question, and Damen doubted now that he would. "You're here with DeVere, aren't you?" he said, though he didn't truly expect an answer.

Sure enough, he didn't get one. But the way color sprang back into the boy's face was answer enough. He rearranged his features to project haughty indifference, and he marched away without another word.

"Was that Nicaise?" a familiar voice asked, and Damen turned to find Laurent arriving from the opposite direction. He must have seen some hint of Damen's epiphany on his face, because he narrowed his eyes. "What did you tell him?" he asked.

"I didn't understand," Damen said, hearing the dull sound of his own voice, "until after."

"Govart."

Damen nodded.

A moment of silence, during which Damen could practically hear Laurent's mind working. Then he said, "It doesn't matter now. If Nicaise tells him, it won't change anything."

"Do you think he will? Tell your uncle?"

Laurent looked into the crowd as though following Nicaise's curly head, though he was long gone by now. "I don't know," he said, and Damen heard it as what it was: a frank and true assessment. He didn't know whether he had bought himself a true allegiance with Nicaise. He hoped he had, but he wasn’t sure.

"You care about him," Damen said, realizing that the words were true as he spoke them.

Laurent met his eyes for the first time since returning, as though only just realizing that Damen should not have been speaking this way to him, not after how he had left. It unsettled him, Damen saw it in his face, in the wary way he held himself.

"It was a lie," Damen said simply, by way of explanation. Laurent didn't deny it. In fact, a pink flush -- rosy and perfect in the gilded light of the room -- came slowly to his cheeks.

He turned away from Damen, though he remained where he stood. As though he had moved to step away, Damen reached out, wrapping his fingers lightly around Laurent's wrist -- not enough to hold him there against his will, just enough to communicate that Damen wanted him to stay, to listen, to hear him out.

"Laurent," he said, pitching his voice low so that none of these people could overhear what he had to say.

But he didn't get a chance to say it before Laurent said, "Damen, I told you how it's to be."

"Is there no other way?" Damen asked, allowing Laurent to read everything in his face. His hope and his uncertainty and this welling feeling that seemed to be growing stronger and more desperate with every passing moment.

He waited for Laurent's wide eyes, the parted lips, but they didn't come. "You have people," Laurent said, "relying on you."

The words hit, precisely as Laurent intended them to, as always. "You have no one," Damen countered.

Laurent's jaw tightened, just so. If Damen hadn't been watching for any touch of reaction, he would never have seen it. But he had struck a nerve, imperfectly hidden, and he pressed his advantage, as Laurent had taught him.

"You don't believe in the things your uncle believes in. You don't want to use your father's company the way he uses it. I didn't understand before why you're fighting so hard, but I get it now. I thought you just wanted it because it was supposed to be yours, because you were entitled to it, but that's not it. You were never the one who was meant to take over from your father. It wasn't until your brother died that the company was even going to be yours. And since then, it's not the company you've been fighting for at all. You've only ever fought to stop your uncle."

Now Laurent was watching him with wide eyes, except for when he was glancing around the room, making sure that no one else could hear what they were saying. What Damen was saying. Afraid that it would get back to DeVere somehow. Afraid that he would hear the truth, and guess Laurent's next moves before he had a chance to enact them.

But when Laurent spoke, he had regained his composure, and while he was clearly shaken by Damen's words, his own came out cool and hard. "You can't honestly think that I would turn my back on my father's life's work. My family's legacy, everything that my brother worked for."

Damen considered. "No," he said, "I don't think you would walk away from it. But I do think you would use it better."

Laurent didn't say anything in answer to this, just went on watching Damen. Damen had the impression Laurent didn't know what to say, and it might have been the first time such a thing had ever happened.

"Work with us," Damen said. "Work with Akielos. Together, we can do so much more than what either of us could do alone. Think of all the good we could accomplish. And then we --" but to speak the next words would be akin to cutting his own heart out of his chest and setting it out on the table before Laurent, and he didn't know how likely such a gesture was to be received well.

Still, Laurent said nothing, and there was a long, quiet moment that stretched between them, where the gentle murmurs of the event still happening around them didn't penetrate. It was like that first kiss, just inside the loft, the tension between them somehow both holding them together and keeping them apart. Damen was tempted to break it, and didn't dare.

And then, from the main room there came the light chime of someone tapping on a glass, and the murmuring died down expectantly. DeVere was about to speak, and they were out of time.

#

"Ladies and gentlemen," DeVere was saying as Laurent and Damen slipped back into the main room of the event. He was standing a few steps up the large marble staircase that led into the upper floors of the museum, which were closed, and which was where, Damen suspected, Nik had stashed Govart.

DeVere stood alone, looking grand in his own tux, which seemed more natural on him than it did on Laurent, as though he were more comfortable in ostentatiously rich attire than in the simpler clothing that Laurent preferred. In fact, Damen didn't think he'd ever seen DeVere in anything less than a three-piece suit, even though Laurent usually wore only nice shirts and pants, as did many of the other people who worked for DeVere Corp. that Damen had seen.

"Thank you for joining me tonight. I must confess, I feel a personal excitement about this particular project," Damen's skin crawled, "and I thank you all for being here to honor it and celebrate it alongside me. This project has been a pet passion of mine for some time."

For the next couple of minutes, DeVere spoke about the youth center he had been building in the lower city, ostensibly to help kids from underprivileged backgrounds.

On paper, it was a great idea -- to give children support, to put some of DeVere Corp.'s massive amounts of money back where it belonged: in the hands of the people whose labor had earned it, and using it to help the kids of those families, and the kids who had no family. But Damen already had little enough reason to believe that DeVere would use his youth center as advertised. Laurent's revelation -- now fatally confirmed by Nicaise's presence here tonight -- about his uncle's true plans for the center had only accelerated his plans to tear the man down from his throne.

As DeVere spoke, Laurent and Damen made their way through the crowd, closer and closer to where DeVere stood. No doubt he knew they were there. He may even have guessed that they planned to make some move, and depending on whether Nicaise had gone to him after his aborted conversation with Damen, he might even know about Govart.

But there was nothing he could do about it, unless he wanted to make a scene. And, Damen was sure, if a scene was inevitable, he would prefer the responsibility for it to land on Laurent's shoulders, rather than his own.

"Helping the children of those less fortunate has always been a pastime of mine,” DeVere was saying, and here he held out his arm in a welcoming gesture. Damen was still far enough back in the gathered crowd that he didn't see who DeVere was welcoming until Nicaise had joined him on the steps.

The boy’s face was carefully blank, showing none of the disdain he usually wore stamped over it, and none of the fear he had displayed to Damen at the sound of Govart's name either.

The churning in Damen's stomach was permanent now, and he appreciated it for grounding him, for reminding him how high the stakes really were. These people could dress it up in ballgowns and gold, but there was a grime here that they had allowed into their world, welcomed with open arms, and celebrated. Beside him, Laurent's face showed none of the open disgust Damen knew he had on his own, but his shoulders were tense, his jaw locked shut, and his icy gaze was fixed, unblinking, on his uncle.

"I took Nicaise into my home when his parents abandoned him," DeVere said. Next to him, Nicaise remained stony and blank. "I only wished I could have done more, for all of those like him who had been left behind by the world. And now, thanks to your generous help, and the might of my late brother's will and dedication in building his fine company, I can do what I've always wanted to do for the unfortunate children of our great city."

Following some invisible prompt, Nicaise slipped once more away from DeVere and into the crowd. Damen had the sudden urge to collect him, to bring him back to where he stood with Laurent. But there was no safety to be found in this room tonight.

"What is it exactly, Uncle, that you've always wanted to do for them?" 

Laurent's voice carried clearly and easily over the crowd. It startled a few surprised comments out of some mouths, but for the most part everyone stood in shocked silence for a long moment. Laurent had made no attempt to hide where the challenge had come from, or who had said it. He knew his uncle wouldn't stop him. This was to be the final face-off in a long, long fight -- one that they would each be happy to put behind them.

DeVere, as always, remained confident that he would win. And so he merely smiled mildly into the crowd as Laurent moved forward, pressing more easily now between the bodies as people either tried to get away from him or to let him through.

"I want to shelter them," DeVere answered. "Support them. Help them grow to be strong individuals."

On his face, his smile had turned smug. No matter what Laurent was planning, he believed he would come out on top. Damen felt his body tense and focus as it did in the ring, as though he could simply leap onto the stairs and fight DeVere with his fists, as he'd fought Govart. He wished he could. He missed the simplicity of his life before Laurent, when everything had been either good or bad, right or wrong, and always easy to distinguish between the two.

"Help them grow," Laurent repeated. By now he had worked his way to the front of the hundred-and-fifty people standing before the stairs. He faced his uncle from several feet below him, and yet there was a sort of power in refusing to set himself at his uncle's level.

Damen moved closer now too, though he hung back by a few feet.

"Yes, Laurent," DeVere said. His smile had a bit of an edge to it now, though this might have been wishful thinking on Damen's part. "My nephew, ladies and gentlemen," DeVere said magnanimously to the crowd. "He doesn't usually attend these events. I'm sure he doesn't mean to be rude."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Laurent said, turning briefly to acknowledge the dozens of people surrounding him, as though he had only just noticed them. Despite the conversational turn, he made sure his voice carried. "I didn't mean to interrupt. Only I'm curious, Uncle, whether these people know your true intentions for your 'youth center.'"

DeVere's smile turned to the venomous grin of a viper. Whatever he had expected Laurent to say, it hadn't been this.

The money. It popped into Damen’s head as clear as a ringing bell. That had been what he'd expected Laurent to say, as soon as he knew of Laurent's presence here.

That was why it hadn't mattered to Laurent that Damen saw him breaking into Guion's office: if Damen wasn't working for DeVere, he would know it when he saw Damen's reaction to his little excursion; but if he was, and he told DeVere what Laurent had done, it wouldn't have mattered because it wouldn't have spoiled Laurent's true plan.

The money was an important piece, because that was the language the people in this room spoke, and Damen had no doubt that Laurent would use it. But it had never been the primary facet of his plan to take down his uncle, and DeVere had not seen that coming.

Heavy tension had fallen over the crowd now. A couple of yards from where he stood, Damen could see Nicaise, whose eyes were wide and locked on Laurent.

"My uncle," Laurent said, stepping forward out of the crowd for the first time, and turning to face them, though he still didn't mount the stairs, "has been lying to the shareholders of DeVere Corp., my father's company, about how much this pet project of his was going to cost. He's been moving money to funnel company resources into its construction and its staff. Silence is expensive, as it turns out."

He certainly had the crowd's attention, even if no one knew what to do with it. DeVere remained suspiciously silent through all of this, maybe hoping Laurent would impale himself on his own sword. Given the audience, Damen half-wondered if he wasn't right.

"If his motives were philanthropic," Laurent said, "I would leave him to it. Unfortunately, I'm afraid my uncle has rather more nefarious reasons for wanting total access to a building full of young children who have no one else looking out for them."

A slow, rolling boil of shock spread over the crowd as Laurent allowed a quiet moment for his words to make impact. There were several audible gasps throughout the crowd, and even a few cries of outrage, though it was impossible to tell if these were prompted by the accusation itself or by Laurent's having dared to level it.

Damen's eyes flicked up immediately to DeVere, who had arranged his face to look somehow both sympathetic and deeply wounded.

"Laurent," he said, ostensibly addressing his nephew but making sure that his voice carried over everyone, "I know you've been disturbed ever since your brother died. But these are very serious, and hurtful, allegations to bring against me. Come aside and let us discuss what's truly bothering you, privately. As a family." His tone was theatrically wounded and painfully condescending. Laurent ignored him.

"Perhaps you find my methods unsavory,” Laurent said to the crowd. “However, I hope you'll understand that this is something I could not allow to go any further, knowing what I know."

"And what is it, exactly, that you think you know, Laurent?" Real concern in DeVere's voice now, though it was hard to tell whether the rest of the crowd was picking up on it and recognizing it for what it was, or if they were merely uncomfortable with the spectacle.

Of course, it had to be this way, whether they understood it or not. There needed to be public outrage, a rallying outcry, or DeVere would have been able to weasel his way out of any accusation, any consequence. He had the money, the power, and the connections that he could leverage so he would never be forced to account for himself. It was only here, in a public arena, faced with his peers, that he could ever be brought to task. Laurent had understood that from the beginning, and he had waited and plotted until DeVere had set his own trap.

"Don't worry, Uncle," Laurent said. Here he turned to look over his shoulder, so that his next words were the first he had directed at DeVere himself since he'd stepped out to address the crowd. "They won't have to take my word for it. I've brought witnesses."

At this, Torveld stepped out of the throng, to another round of shocked whispers and muttered exclamations. Clearly he was well-known among this circle, and his testimony in this unofficial trial would lend an immediate sense of legitimacy to Laurent's claims.

"What Laurent says about DeVere’s use of the money is true," Torveld said. "We have worked together on occasion in the past. Though, in light of what Laurent has recently told me, and now you, I can promise you that ours is an association that will be ending forthwith." His expression plainly bore outright distaste and loathing, and Damen felt something begin to settle inside him at the sight of it, and the calm confidence of Torveld's voice. 

He went on to explain how DeVere had convinced him to invest in his new project, and as Torveld had always had a soft spot for the children of the lower city, he had agreed to help however he could. Through his involvement in the project, and his status as a high-level investor, he became privy to certain movements of money that were not exactly above-board. He delivered this news to an impressed crowd, clearly a group of people concerned with making sure that their money went where people told them it was going to go.

At the same time, it was clear to Damen that this would not be enough to turn the tide of opinion as fully against DeVere as he and Laurent wanted it to go. It had never, he thought again, truly been about the money.

In all likelihood, everyone in this room had at one time or another used their money or their power in less than savory ways, and none of them liked the idea that they could be publicly called out and shamed for it. They would chastise DeVere for this, in their own ways, but they would not condemn him.

"Thank you, Torveld," Lauren said, and Torveld nodded and returned to his place in the group.

"You will find, of course," DeVere said, after making a show of patiently allowing this to go on, "nothing illegal in the movements we made. It is customary for funds to be shifted from one account to another as operations change and take shape over time."

"Of course," Laurent agreed mildly. "But Torveld was only one witness, for only one of my allegations."

A restless shifting overtook the crowd now. Laurent's second and more licentious claim had everyone excited. Damen wanted to shake them, to make them understand that this wasn't just some drama playing out for their entertainment, but the real lives of real children at stake -- and because of a broken system, in their hands.

"Oh?" DeVere said. "And who else do you plan to trot out in this little circus?"

Laurent turned again to face his uncle, and it seemed clear to Damen that these next words were meant especially for him, and him alone.

"An old employee of yours," he said. "Someone who wanted something that you were never able to provide." He pitched his voice lower, so that Damen only just managed to catch the rest of his words. "Fortunately for me, I was." He clearly thought DeVere would know the employee in question, and given the subtle tightening around DeVere's mouth and eyes, he did. But this was news to him. Nicaise hadn’t told him of Govart’s presence.

But after the initial reaction, his face smoothed again. "Honored guests," he said, addressing the crowd once more. "I apologize again for this interruption. As you can see, my nephew is very disturbed. Perhaps we had better wrap things up for tonight. I thank you all for coming."

Damen couldn't believe it. DeVere was simultaneously trying to call what he believed to be Laurent's bluff, and disperse his audience, all at once. But Govart was here. All Laurent had to do was call him down, and as long as Govart believed him regarding his offer, then they could rely on Govart to be on their side. Couldn't they? He looked at Laurent, trying to read his face, but Laurent was only watching his uncle warily, as unsure suddenly as Damen himself.

The crowd was beginning to rustle again, but no one was moving away either. They wanted to see how this was going to play out.

"I don't believe," DeVere said, extending his apology further, "that my nephew considered just  _ how many people _ his actions this evening would affect. Otherwise I'm sure he never would have behaved this way. I do apologize."

Again, Damen looked to Laurent, and saw that his face had gone white under the warm lights. His jaw had tightened again, Damen could see it move from here as he bit down on words or thoughts, realizing something just before Damen felt the pieces slide together in his own mind.

DeVere did understand that they had brought Govart to serve as a witness. He understood what Laurent had promised to give him in exchange for his cooperation. Whether he believed Laurent would follow through on his promise was irrelevant, because he did believe, at least, that it would be worth it to Govart to find out.

However he also knew that in order to be believed among this crowd of people, Govart would have to give names, dates, exact situations. Actionable charges. Laurent had known all of that.

What Laurent hadn't known, what he hadn't guessed, was how many people here tonight might be affected by those charges. Damen didn't know why. Maybe some of these people had helped DeVere over the years. Maybe some of them had been victims, or their children had. But to use Govart as a witness would be to subject them all to public scrutiny, and Damen could see from the look of stark horror on Laurent's face that he wouldn't do it. He wouldn’t risk exposing DeVere’s victims in front of all of these people.

Still, the crowd lingered, refusing to accept their dismissal. DeVere weathered this as mildly as he had everything else. "Unless you would like to call your witness to speak here, now?" he offered, bland and bored and unimpressed.

Damen pressed forward, unsure what he could do, but wanting only to be there to support Laurent whatever happened next. Everything they had worked toward together was crumbling. The money wasn't enough to stop DeVere, and after this public show, it would be only too easy for him to force Laurent from the corporation entirely. Damen knew Laurent knew all of this. He did not know what was turning in Laurent's head, only that thoughts were racing through it as his breath entered his chest in shallow bursts. Damen was close enough now to see it, to see the sweat just pricking at his temples. He was only a few feet away, hovering at the edge of the crowd.

"There's another witness I can call," Laurent said then, his voice tight and strained, only the thinnest veneer of his typical control still holding it in check.

Damen's eyes swung to Nicaise, but Laurent's never did.

His uncle looked down at him, a falsely-interested eyebrow raised in a gesture so much like Laurent's. Still so sure that he had everything in the palm of his hand. "Oh?" he said.

Laurent had turned fully away from the crowd by now, and he stood facing his uncle, his head tilted back to look at him squarely. Every muscle in his body was held in perfect, precise tension. "Me," he said.

And Damen saw nothing. He was looking into a supernova. A black hole. The shocked reaction of the crowd behind him was static. The room faded from every sense. He had no mind, no body. He was only blind rage from the moment Laurent's statement struck him, the knife point finally driven home to lodge fatally in the soft meat of his heart.

He didn't come back to himself until a pair of strong arms wrapped around him from behind, and a familiar voice was speaking directly into his ear, saying, "Damen, enough. That's  _ enough _ , Damen."

Nik, he thought, even as he struggled to get away, to free himself, so that he could return to his singular purpose. But Nik held him tightly, and after a few moments, he was forced to give up or seriously hurt Nik in his struggle to get away, and he had regained enough presence of mind to understand that he didn't want to hurt Nik.

Slowly the room returned around him. The warm light, which seemed so incongruous, now, in the new light of another kind in which Damen now had to see the world. The crowd, which had scattered in screams and chaos as Damen had charged at DeVere. DeVere himself, lying where he'd stood on the stairs, now bleeding from the head and apparently unconscious.

Damen twisted in Nik's arms until he could see Laurent, who was also where Damen had last seen him, at the foot of the staircase. He was staring at Damen with an open, vulnerable look of shock, which was how Damen knew just how stunned he truly was, or he would have hidden it from him. He didn't seem to know what to make of what Damen had done.

And what had Damen done?

"Is he alive?" Damen said, and his own voice sounded strange to his ears, dark and low and not at all concerned that the answer might be no.

"I'm not sure," Nik said, at the same time that one of the waiters came forward. Damen recognized him, a member of Akielos. He had abandoned his tray and now sank to the steps beside DeVere to feel for a pulse.

"He's alive," he said. "I'll call an ambulance, but we need to get out of here."

Damen saw Nik nod from his peripheral vision, but his eyes were back on Laurent the moment he found out he had failed to kill DeVere.

Laurent was not looking at his bleeding uncle. His eyes seemed never to have left Damen. More than once over the course of their acquaintance, Damen had wished he could read Laurent as easily as Laurent could read anyone, but now more than ever before, he wanted to know what Laurent was thinking.

Even if he had known what to say, however, he wouldn't have had the chance to ask. Nik had begun to drag him back through the chaos in the direction of the kitchen and the back of the museum. Damen didn't fight him. Fighting seemed pointless now. Every inch of him wanted to reach out for Laurent, but he could feel his uncle's blood drying on his hands, and he knew he shouldn't touch him now.

Nik managed to get him into the kitchen, where he hastily held his hands under cool water in the sink, scrubbing at them to get as much of the blood off as quickly as he could. He had just begun to say that he would bring a car around to get Damen back to the Akielos HQ as soon as he could, when Laurent stepped into the room, with Nicaise following close behind him.

"No," Laurent said. "Come to my apartment. The police will be less likely to follow us there."

Nik only stared at him for a moment, and then he nodded slowly. Damen knew Nik wouldn't trust Laurent, but what choice did they have? One of those people out there would surely have called the cops by now, and if they followed a car back to HQ, it wouldn't just be them in danger, but everyone.

The four of them hurried out into the alley behind the museum and found that one of the other Akielos waiters had brought a car around already. Laurent slid into the driver's seat with shaking hands, but no other sign of any trepidation. Nicaise took the passenger seat beside him, looking, for once, like the frightened kid he must always have been. Damen and Nik took the back seat in wary silence.

Laurent sped, as always, through the city, though he did seem to operate with some degree of restraint in comparison to his recklessness.

Damen tried to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, but he remained indivisibly focused on the road. After a couple minutes, they heard sirens in the distance, and they all waited with their breath stilled in their lungs to hear whether they were drawing closer or further away. But Laurent had been right: the sirens were moving in the opposite direction, deeper into the lower city.

They had no trouble in the garage beneath Laurent's building, nor in the elevator. In fact, it was late enough at night that they didn't see anyone as they all stood in the four corners of the elevator, awkwardly avoiding looking at each other -- except Damen, who couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from Laurent.

The events of the night didn't seem to have touched him, except for the tension around his eyes. His tux remained immaculate, his hair only softly tousled by the rush to get away from the museum and the drive back.

At his side, Nicaise was slowly gaining his own rigid control over himself, though his eyes remained wide and wary. Nik was glancing from Damen to Laurent to Nicaise and around again, over and over, as though he might be able to put all of these pieces together if he stared long enough.

Finally, the elevator reached the top floor, and Laurent let them all into his apartment. Immediately, Damen felt himself relax, as though he had just stepped into his own home, or at least, somewhere he felt safe. Somewhere that the dangers of the world couldn't touch him, or anyone else. Here there were only the familiar, comfortable dangers: a sharp tongue, a hard word, a melting resolve and a tender, bruised heart.

Laurent left Nik and Damen alone in the living room while he brought Nicaise further into the apartment, down the hall. They were gone for a while, and for much of that time, Nik merely watched Damen.

"I told our guy at the hospital to look out for DeVere. He's going to let me know what happens," he said finally. “Though, to be honest,” here he hesitated a moment, “I don’t think he’ll be waking up. His head hit those marble steps pretty hard.”

Damen looked up, feeling his own haunted eyes move without fully registering what Nik said. "Thanks," he said, when the rest of him caught up, meaning it for the information about the hospital and letting the rest stand.

Nik nodded, but he still looked wary. He didn't understand why Damen had reacted as he had. Damen got that. But he couldn't explain it either. At least, he couldn't explain it in a way that would have made sense to Nik. Nik, who always tried to do not just the right thing, but the practical thing.

He could not have explained that he didn't regret it. That he understood he'd potentially sacrificed everything, from his position with Akielos to his life, but that there had been nothing else for him to do in that moment. That he couldn't have lived with himself if he'd reacted in any other way.

He couldn't make Nik understand that, but after a long moment spent regarding Damen closely, Nik seemed to understand something. He sighed, and he nodded. "I told you this was a bad idea," he said, with a tone of weary resignation.

For the first time that night, Damen smiled. He nodded too, apologetically. Nik had been right. This had been a terrible plan from the start, his coming here. But he couldn't bring himself to regret any of it.

Eventually, Laurent emerged alone, stripped of the outer layers of his tux, but still wearing the pristine white shirt and the pressed black trousers. "Nicaise is asleep in my room," he said, his voice hushed and low as though he might wake Nicaise from here.

Damen carefully didn't react to the fact that Laurent's bed had been claimed for the night.

Laurent walked slowly over to where Damen and Nik were still standing in the living room. "Thank you," he said, looking at Nik, "for your help tonight." As though he had picked up Laurent's dry cleaning or answered a prickly phone call.

Nik nodded, a little awkwardly. Clearly he didn't know what to do with Laurent. Damen didn't have the heart to tell him that this was Laurent in his mildest form.

"I would like to speak with you," Laurent said, still addressing Nik, "about joining Akielos. Now that my inheritance of DeVere Corp. should be uncontested, I think I could be a useful ally."

Damen tried not to react visibly to these words, holding himself in check as Laurent always did. But he felt breath rush into him, and color come into his face. A soaring, flying happiness was filling him, and he had to exert a fierce effort of self-control to remain still and calm as he said, "You know, technically I'm the leader of Akielos."

"Oh," Laurent said, his own voice utterly mild as he turned to face Damen with the faintest lift to one eyebrow. "Really?"

And Damen understood, all at once, from that single precise brow to the bland look on his face, from the wide, innocent blue eyes to the smallest trace of a quirk at the corner of his lip, that Laurent was playing with him.

He stopped holding back the joy and allowed it to burst out of him, spilling into every part of him for Laurent to do with it as he pleased. "I think an alliance could be arranged," he said, and he drew Laurent to him by the wrist, ignoring Nik's long-suffering groan, to brush an artlessly delighted kiss to his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again, so very much, for reading and taking this journey with me! It's been several weeks of obsessive writing on my part. If you made it to the end, I hope you feel it was worth your time. If this was even half as fun for you to read as it was for me to write, I'll count it a success. I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts and feelings if you want to take the time to drop a comment below! Comments genuinely make my entire life. Either way, thank you deeply and dearly for reading and sharing this with me.


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